Data exchange format? Yeah not great. I think it's got potential as a format for complicated text and markup heavy blobs though. The idea of using XML as HTML

Data exchange format? Yeah not great. I think it's got potential as a format for complicated text and markup heavy blobs though. The idea of using XML as HTML was... an idea, but rather than trying to rationalize it as a super complicated dtd, they should have instead opened it up and defined mechanisms for creating custom tags, sort of like how React works now. XML is great for applications where you might want to discard some or all of the data easily; shame the way it was employed required you to pretty explicitly handle every possible permutation of the data.