A thought-provoking article from ZDNET concludes, "XML standards are the latest in a series of great hopes in IT. Too bad it's all marketing and not the reality." The article points out four mistakes: Nonalignment, over-promising, overdoing it, and overreaching being made by people that are creating XML based standards.

Read article here

I happen to be a big believer in XML, but I do agree with some of the points made in this article. I don't really think XML will fail itself, as there is too much push for it right now and it helps in a lot of areas. However, a lot of the standards probably will fail because of lack of interest in applying them, complexity, not enough complexity, etc.

A lot of companies will just use their own internal standards, or create compatability with their partners instead of trying to fit their needs into an existing XML standard, and of course some people are just tired of waiting for standards bodies to make decisions.

my humble .02...

Robert

I think some author's critics are pretty right but I do see a new wave or revolution of internet: embed artificial intelligence into web. XML is the language that both human and machine can understand and are accepted universally.

XLM is over-hyper. IMO it's just a standar way to create a plain text file, leaving the parser mechanism implementation to others.
You can implement a XSL-like thing for properties, join XML and XPATH and you have a properties file, etc. If you're using third party tools for your things it's ok, but try to implement comunication protocol between apps and it's a headache.