XMLs downfall was not providing built-in serialization/de-serialization. If XML had started with libraries like https://pydantic-xml.readthedocs.io/en/latest ht

XMLs downfall was not providing built-in serialization/de-serialization. If XML had started with libraries like https://pydantic-xml.readthedocs.io/en/latest https://pydantic-xml.readthedocs.io/en/latest and people understood that this was the way to produce and consume XML -- that if you're using something like xpath or touching the raw tree with getChildElement and the like for more than one-off scripts something has gone wrong. And that xslt is at best an optimization and at worst staring into the abyss so don't start with it. But now it doesn't matter because the backing format doesn't really matter and JSON was there at the right place right time.