Sadly, like any popular technology, it experienced its fair share of use and abuse (people wanted XML database, XLST, XML in Scala, etc.). It's a much-maligned

Sadly, like any popular technology, it experienced its fair share of use and abuse (people wanted XML database, XLST, XML in Scala, etc.). It's a much-maligned tech, and with a few tweaks to the robustness, it could be pretty nice (see https://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/xml5 https://annevankesteren.nl/2007/10/xml5). I'd take it over YAML any day. And I speak from a YAML parser implementer perspective. Making a 1.2/1.3 YAML parser is hard. The number of edge cases and states is absurd, while the specification needs to be on HTML/XML level. E.g. When I started working on YAML parser I didn't expect to be fixing errors in spec. But here I am.