At the core of XML you can still see the SGML origins. It is great stuff if you have an actual document to work on - like, documentation, or an essay, or a manual... there are some very comprehensive schemas and renderers around for those use cases, that can do heavy lifting where Markdown or Word start failing you, and TeX is inappropriate.<p>What polluted XML the most was simply being overhyped, especially as &quot;human-readable&quot;. It&#x27;s not binary, but it&#x27;s also not a good front end for any human task. Although it&#x27;s capable of flexible markup, that makes it an inefficient source format. Even in the case where you have a document to write, it can be more palatable to parse something simpler and convert it, and then apply finishing touches to the XML where the precision works in your favor.<p>That said, most data is not really a document, but a tiny fragment with relations. Documents only make sense once you have some kind of story to tell.