Not sure if I get the argument, however I can echo that many benefits of the XML ecosystem are given away because of compromises. I really would like to see a sound schema-driven XML landscape that takes the learnings from hedge or visibly pushdown automata and makes sure that you can actually parse, validate and transcode XML (e.g. to binary representations) fast. I really am fascinated by the possibilities of grammar based compression on XML like done in the MPEG7 standard (I think it's used in DVB-T). Would have been great if XML could have at least replaced ASN.1 . XML should simply support different encodings natively. If you just want something readable and heavily extensible there seams no reason against JSON .