I kinda miss it, actually. XML had many warts, but at least everybody spoke it, and it was the same everywhere. Occasionally you still had some overlapping but different things, like XSD and RELAX NG schemas (though even there, there was a big difference - one is a language for describing data types, and the other is a language for describing grammars). But it's better than several dialects of JSON, YAML, TOML etc.
I also rather liked thorough extensibility. Namespaces were the right idea, despite clunky syntax. Today you can see Clojure doing something similar in Spec.
And while we're on the subject of XML, XSLT and Clojure; I feel like this is the best solution for readable serialization of tree-like data, and an associated ecosystem of tools (to validate, transform etc). Note some nice features for humans, like the ability to comment out a specific node, in addition to the usual line-oriented comments.
I also rather liked thorough extensibility. Namespaces were the right idea, despite clunky syntax. Today you can see Clojure doing something similar in Spec.
And while we're on the subject of XML, XSLT and Clojure; I feel like this is the best solution for readable serialization of tree-like data, and an associated ecosystem of tools (to validate, transform etc). Note some nice features for humans, like the ability to comment out a specific node, in addition to the usual line-oriented comments.
https://github.com/edn-format/edn