Comment by tonyedgecombe

I quite liked it when it first came out, I'd been dealing with a ton of bespoke formats up until then. Pretty much every one was ambiguous and painful to deal with. It was a step forward being able to push people towards a standard for document transfer.

I suspect it was SOAP and WSDL that killed it for a lot of people though. That was a typical example of a technical solution looking for a problem and complete overkill for most people.

The whole namespace thing was probably a step too far as well.