I find it very sad that people don't value plumbing, argue that infrastructure is fundamentally unexciting, and ignore the fact that without infrastructure improvements like plumbing itself, railroads, highways, and the Internet, we'd be in a very different place, one I don't think too many of us relish returning to. There are thousands, if not millions, of possibilities that XML enables. Yes, you can do all kinds of junk to data in any proprietary way that you like. You can have all the fun in the world processing data any way you want - but when it comes time to share that information, it ain't much good.
Sharing is a difficult concept to sell in many ways.
Not everyone can smell the sewage yet, which makes it harder to sell XML, but we need that plumbing. We need bigger, more stable pipes through which we can connect all that information cleanly. Successfully creating those systems will open the possibilities XML holds, making interchange easier, which opens up new fields in collaboration, information storage and retrieval, data processing, and a host of other fields. A list for W3C XML Developers. A list for W3C XML Developers.