It’s the “slope of enlightenment” phase of the Gartner hype cycle, where people are able to make sober assessments of technologies without undue influence from hype or its backlash. We’re long past the days where XML is used for everything, even when it’s inappropriate, and we’re also past the “trough of disillusionment” phase where people sought alternatives to XML.

I think XML is good for expressing document formats and for configuration settings. I prefer JSON for data serialization, though.