Invisible XML (2025)

This is a cool concept and something I was looking into recently!

IMHO, XML as a concept is a bit underrated and misunderstood nowadays. Unfortunately the way the culture of XML has evolved over the past decades probably has a lot to do with that, but that shouldn't mean we have to throw out the baby and the bathwater.

For one small example of what I mean, Jupyter notebooks are JSON, while it certainly seems to me that XML would be a better fit, minus any concerns about tooling. A cell's content is represented in the file as an array of strings, while in XML it would just be a text node with the literal contents. But more generally, I increasingly feel that XML should have become the lingua franca for abstract syntax trees of all types. Hopefully it can still become that, and Invisible XML seems like a good step in that direction.

By the way, I should point out that the CommonMark AST has an official XML representation, but as far as I know that's the only Markdown dialect that does, and I also don't know of an ixml grammar. Wouldn't it be great if every Markdown dialect had an ixml grammar though? If Invisible XML has any limitations that prevent this from happening, then IMHO those really should be addressed, since if it can't represent Markdown, then it's probably just not very useful after all.