XML sucks at (almost) everything it’s used for. Google has open-sourced Protocol Buffer, a typed, backwards compatible, compact, binary data-interchange format. Combined with YAML for configuration and data-persistence files that need to be human readable, there’s even less reason to use XML for any data-serialization.

XML, in the form of (x)HTML, seems ok for markup, and the XML-based (x)HTML templating in Genshi is the best templating language I’ve ever used (and I’ve used XSLT, Mako, Mighty, PHP, and a few others). I wonder if the reason that HTML (and XML) templating is so difficult, and templating language code is often so ugly, is because XML is actually a poor solution for markup too. HTML is obviously here to stay, but it would be an interesting thought experiment to design a successor markup language that is not strictly hierarchical, more human-readable, and designed with templating in mind.