This was in 2000-2003. With the gift of hindsight we know now that XML was not the future

Some people at the time tried (un)common-sense. Fortunately they took the trouble to whack the ... erm, "rough edges" out of the fashionable groupthink (e.g. http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime... ).

Thanks to them, we now seem on the way to HTML5, which I agree it looks like a good idea.