Comment by dragonwriter

> XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.

There's perhaps no general alternative to it that covers all of the things XML tries to do; there are lots of specific alternatives that cover specific things that XML tries to do. The complaint against XML isn't that there is a better general replacement so much that there is a better replacement for each (or at least, very many) of the applications and that trying to shoehorn all of them into a single solution has costs that outweigh the benefits.