> Ah, the old "throw a bag of nouns at the reader and hope he's intimidated" rhetorical flutist.

The accusation here is a defleciton. OP's point isn't a gish gallop, it's that xml is absolutely littered with edge cases and complexities that all need to be understood.

> optional standards adjacent to XML but not essential

This is exactly OP's point. The standard is everything and the kitchen sink, except for all the bits it doesn't include which are almost imperceptible from the actual standard because of how widely used they are.

XInclude isn't part of the standard, and IME, a minority of systems support it anyway. The OP's comment is an obvious gish-gallop. You can assemble a similarly scary noun list for practically any technology.

Probably the same kind of person who tries to praise JSON's lack of comments as a feature or something.