> A few decades ago XML emerged from the pit. XML [...] could be used for documents, data transfer, and a bunch of other things, and people genuinely liked it [...] They liked it so much that a concerted effort was started to take HTML and rebuild it on top of XML.

XML didn't "emerge" and was repurposed for HTML; it was designed for new vocabularies on the web. The first sentence of the XML spec reads:

> The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML.