It's interesting to me how weighty and important technical decisions get made on the basis of the most superficial aesthetic considerations. XML's data model is beautiful, but on a syntactic level, it's kind of ugly, and I think it's mostly for this reason that a certain segment of the industry eschews it even today.
Honestly, if XML had kept SGML-style implicit closing tags, we might have never seen the rise of alternative data markup systems.
That is, instead of
<foo>some_value</foo>
you should be able to write (as you can write in SGML)
<foo>some_value</>
There. Now in exchange for a slight increase in parser complexity, you address a big syntactic wart (the repetition) the drives people away from XML. Seems like a win to me.
Honestly, if XML had kept SGML-style implicit closing tags, we might have never seen the rise of alternative data markup systems.
That is, instead of
you should be able to write (as you can write in SGML) There. Now in exchange for a slight increase in parser complexity, you address a big syntactic wart (the repetition) the drives people away from XML. Seems like a win to me.