Comment by amluto
I find XML to be perfectly fine as a markup language. I once set up a system to generate logs as XML elements and display them prettily with XSLT. It was delightful!
Using XML as an interchange format for things intended to be read by a machine is not so great. Don’t use it where you actually want something more like protobuf.
XML isnt great for that, but the xml part is the least of the concerns. XSignature and SAML are insane specs, and would still be insane if the underlying presentation language wasnt xml (i mean, then you wouldnt be using xsignature, but if you made sone xsignature like thing for a different presentation language, it would still be crazy)