I believe that more than being verbose (closing tags for example) it is that the whole spec is enormous, with entities and namespaces making it even more complex. Still we see that some of that is actually needed as various json path/schema projects show.
mapping a 1-1 s-expression translation on HTML/XML/JSON/YAML etc. solves nothing. YAML has (had) code execution security problem and parser incompatibility issues. HTML/XML actually need namespaces in a few cases. JSON is abused as "compile target".
There can be no one format that works for everything. This is why I like TOML, it is really good at what it tries to do and stops there.
mapping a 1-1 s-expression translation on HTML/XML/JSON/YAML etc. solves nothing. YAML has (had) code execution security problem and parser incompatibility issues. HTML/XML actually need namespaces in a few cases. JSON is abused as "compile target".
There can be no one format that works for everything. This is why I like TOML, it is really good at what it tries to do and stops there.