I don't know, the few times I have had to XML, I went "This is not so bad, I don't know what all the fuss is about" until I hit namespaces. I don't know if I was just using an inferior library but namespaces sucked. The minute namespaces came into the picture all the joy left the project. And XSLT... I only ever did one thing with it "use the browser to turn demarc XML records into a webpage" and that was pretty cool. but it also firmly convinced me that XML is very much the wrong form factor for a programing language.
My personal thought is that css is not a sgml-like as a sort of rebellion against the way XML was taking over the world. It feels like author had written one too many XSLT's and said "Nope, it ends here, we are not doing that again." Because really, it is very weird that css does not use an XML syntax.
On the topic of the wrong form factor for a programing language. Another good contender is ansible when you try to use it's YAML looping constructs.
I don't know, the few times I have had to XML, I went "This is not so bad, I don't know what all the fuss is about" until I hit namespaces. I don't know if I was just using an inferior library but namespaces sucked. The minute namespaces came into the picture all the joy left the project. And XSLT... I only ever did one thing with it "use the browser to turn demarc XML records into a webpage" and that was pretty cool. but it also firmly convinced me that XML is very much the wrong form factor for a programing language.
My personal thought is that css is not a sgml-like as a sort of rebellion against the way XML was taking over the world. It feels like author had written one too many XSLT's and said "Nope, it ends here, we are not doing that again." Because really, it is very weird that css does not use an XML syntax.
On the topic of the wrong form factor for a programing language. Another good contender is ansible when you try to use it's YAML looping constructs.