Tim Bray wishes XML a happy 15th birthday:

When XML was in­vented, it was the world’s only use­ful cross-plat­form cross-lan­guage cross-char­ac­ter-set cross-data­base data for­mat. Where by “use­ful” I mean, “came with a pretty good suite of free open-source tools to do the basic things you needed.”

That’s why it ended up being used for all sorts of wildly-in­ap­pro­pri­ate things.