Irrespective of the current uptake, and seen as an experiment, XML has been a success. It proved that: You can have a data interchange format that is radically independent of your computer architecture, operating system, programming language, and application. The only sane text standard for modern computing is Unicode, which in practice is affordable and reasonably straightforward to use. Prior to 1996, neither of these things were widely believed. The only “interoperable” data format was ASN.1, which is horrible and lacked quality software support. The resistance to Unicode was significant and widespread, and adoption was disappointing. Today, #1 and #2 above are the (low) bar to entry for any data packaging technology. Tim Bray
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