I appreciate, but don't fully understand Tim Bray's position on XML.

The only way to achieve interoperability at the software interface level is for there to be exactly one implementation - for example Perl or Linux. Which is not what we originally had in mind...When somebody sends me something that's advertised to be XML, the first thing I do is run xmlwf (James Clark's expat parser) on it and then open it up in Internet Explorer. (They never disagree, but I do both anyhow).

How is the union of xmlwf and IE any different from having exactly one implementation? Isn't this how we get things like parse at all costs? And how does "an XML document know what encoding it's in" if the document omits the <?xml ?> directive? (I'm hopefully exposing my XML illiteracy on this last question).

While I accept that a large part of the problem with XML may be the popular APIs for dealing with it, I'm not sure Tim's answers are on target. Tim does draw the parallel to socket libraries in talking about interop. Sockets are still a pain in the neck to code at the socket level, I just hardly ever have to do it anymore. Maybe I'll feel the same about XML when I can substitute XML for "socket".