alt Hacker News> It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done?
But it used to be. And so it was used for a lot of things where it wasn't a great fit. XML works fairly well as a markup format, but for a lot of things, something like json models the data better.
> which case there's no excuse to overcomplicate things.
And that's a problem with xml. It's too complicated. Even if the basic model of xml is a good fit for your data, most of the time you don't need to worry about namespaces and entity definitions, and DTDs, but those are still part of most implementations and can expose more attack surface for vulnerabilities (especially entity definitions). And the APIs of libraries are generally fairly complicated.
I don't think I'd agree that it's a problem with the tool. However you do raise a good point - that there are problems that JSON and similar struggle with where XML would introduce a noticeable amount of unneeded complexity. It's a wide enough gap that a simplified subset of XML is probably be warranted. (I assume it must exist by now and I've just never heard of it?)