XML and XSLT are a bad fit in many common uses, that's why the argument is frustrating. If you are almost always working with projects where you own the frontend and the backend, just stick with JSON and RPC.

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Telemakhos 3 days ago | parent [-]

If you’re only using XML for AJAX style communication of fragments of data between a model and view, sure, use JSON or whatever. If, on the other hand, you’re encoding a representation of a text and need to mark it up to indicate bibliographic features and textual variation between editions, you need TEI XML. If you want a dataset to be available in a machine-readable format at a particular address and also have that data look good for humans, you want XML. XML is for more than passing messages from a backend to a frontend.

	▲	_heimdall 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wasn't meaning to imply that XML is only for backend to frontend communication. I only mentioned they as it seems to be the most common task in web jobs today and is usually what a person does most often when I hear the complaint that XML is pointless and we should just use JSON.