XML wasn't a good fit for databases or configuration files Except where the database is used to index a collection of XML data. E.g. we store dependency graphs

XML wasn't a good fit for databases or configuration files Except where the database is used to index a collection of XML data. E.g. we store dependency graphs (the output of a natural language parser) in an XML database (Berkeley DB XML), which allows us to quickly select a subset of interesting parses using XPath queries. Sure, we could use a different storage format and query language. But there are good XML databases and XPath is well-known and standardized. The actual XML is normally only touched by machines.