Thanks, I found this explanation really helpful, and almost obvious in retrospect (as the best explanations often are!).

I had been thinking that all of these extra features that XML have are just a case of massive overengineering that no one would ever need. In fact it's a case of taking something fundamentally meant for text documents with extra markup, as the name implies, and misapplying it to config files and IPC messages which are just not the original domain at all.

Thank you.

I think we should draw on XML strength points. People read articles in browser, not plain text. "Add to cart" is just a POST request with id

    curl -d id=foo

yet we have forms and interactivity. Like in literate programming text and data live together, interactive application like a Smalltalk image.

In XML we can separate data from presentation.

    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="foo.css"?>
    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="bar.xsl"?>
    <root>...

Machine receives data, human receives application with documentation, builder. That's exactly what we have today except UI can be plugged to any stored document. To good to be true.

I think XML was killed by poor usability. Plain text XML, XHTML and XSLT authoring is not fun.

I am trying to uncover it from DOM perspective [1], so far I like it more than Markdown. XHTML and HTML is just a serialization format. HTML is not a good one [2], [3], [4]. XSLT may have nice GUI or compact syntax like RELAX NG.

[1] http://sergeykish.com/live-pages

[2] http://sergeykish.com/script-style-is-cdata-in-html

[3] http://sergeykish.com/pre-newline-ignored-in-html-test

[4] http://sergeykish.com/content-after-html-appended-to-body-in...