Comment by rwallace

The first part of the first quote is incorrect. The problem XML solved was bloody hard, though most people nowadays have forgotten what it was. It was to get the world's programmers to stop creating binary file formats, to put an end to the situation where every time you went onto a site, the first thing you had to do was reverse engineer binary files with a hex dump utility. XML, to its very great credit, solved that problem.

Now if you want to start asking whether it solves the problem as well as today's competing technologies like JSON, at that point I will step back and hold my peace.