At some point XML was everywhere: Deployment descriptors (j2ee), build files (ant), xHTML, debug log files (log4j), word documents, RPCs (xmlrpc up to the soap

At some point XML was everywhere: Deployment descriptors (j2ee), build files (ant), xHTML, debug log files (log4j), word documents, RPCs (xmlrpc up to the soap monster) etc ... One of the key point of having a textual format was its human readability but a lot of those forced use cases were not good for XML (like RPCs!) where it became as readable as binary. This what gave it its bad reputation. There are some niches where it survived when it was done well as a structured description language (SVG is excellent for example) but all the "schema less" craze right after the XML craze kind of killed it for its original purpose structured documents.