"Complexity is like taxation.", Master Foo began. "Producers and consumers alike will always see a tax as unfair unless they can see benefits to themselves in paying it. XML - as classically articulated - suffers from the fact that the costs and benefits associated with its usage occur in different places in the value chain. As a publisher, I will definitely benefit from XML but as a consumer, I will only benefit from it if I have (a) technical expertise and (b) non-trivial integration requirements. If I just want to print or search or e-mail or copy/paste, the XML appears to be an unfair complexity tax to me."

"Doing so would reduce the complexity tax to almost zero. end-users or re-sellers who simply need to print/copy/search/e-mail information can do so without even knowing that the files that are processing contain hidden XML-based languages."
"And yet, the harmless looking files would contain all the information that a skilled XML-aware engineer would need in order to extract the semantic structures from the files as required."