VRML is basically an HTML-like format for storing 3D assets. There have been a bunch of XML-based formats created in the following 2 decades, the most used being COLLADA. There are two types of COLLADA compatibility: the ones that uses the official SDK and the ones that don't for licensing reasons such as Blender (all attempts at implementing COLLADA have been painful). Neither can implement the full standard.
Overly engineered standards aside, reading and writing XML for meshes and the like is a waste of computational resources and space.