Fixing what's broke

If I were to get interested in an effort to update XML, it would have to 
be because I saw a chance to address the what I think is it's biggest 
problem:

It's ugly.

And that ugliness is largely a result of it's unnecessary verbosity.

Engineers (I'm one) tend to value concision in expression and XML's 
requirement for named end tags usually just adds noise.

Keep the Infoset and XPath.  Let me operate on elements, attributes and 
content with my existing SAX ContentHandlers and XSLT.  I find these 
technologies powerful and useful.

We can, though, define a terse alternative syntax, one without angle 
brackets and named end tags.  A syntax that can express element, 
attributes and content with the same precision but with a lot less typing.

Changes to the processing stack can be kept at the very edges: parsing 
and serialization.

Cheers,
Bill