I mean it wasn't just that. * `<?xml ...` something line lost a percentage of people already, etc. * Essentially XML was a markup language (SGML stripped down

I mean it wasn't just that. * `<?xml ...` something line lost a percentage of people already, etc. * Essentially XML was a markup language (SGML stripped down), while you can use markup to mark up key-value pairs, it just wasn't designed or optimized for that. * To the contrary, it also did away with the nice SGML features for that instead of `<tag>value</tag>` one could write `<tag/value/` and the self-closing tags (like `<ol><li> ... <li></ol>` in HTML. For most particularly deep config files self closing tags would have been perfect. * XML attributes vs substructure was just an awkward choice to give out. I.e. `<myConfig userId="asdf" host="asdfasdf" ...>` vs `<myConfig><userId>asdf</userId><host>asdfasdf</host></myConfig>`. More so I get the feeling when looking at the XSL, XSLT, etc. mania that a similar pattern was at work as with UML: special interest groups and tooling providers driving the evolution of a standard with their interests in mind and not the interest of users or developers. Overall XML could have been something like this `<myConfig / <userId/asdf/ <host/asdfasdf/` if it was SGML. YAML and JSON succeeded because they had a clean and predictable, no-nonsense mapping between encoding and object-model after decoding. Probably we should all switch to an almost-yaml format that does away with the peculiarities, and the FANG companies would have the momentum to make that happen. I personally would like for HJSON (https://hjson.github.io https://hjson.github.io) to see more adoption, but that train has passed...