lol i remember those days. most XML documents were missing DTDs and schemas (or that third type of schema whose name escapes me) and because the data structure of an XML document didnt map cleanly to lists and hashmaps you needed an ugly hacky xpath to grab whatever data you needed.

Dont even get me started on the mess that was serialisation and deserialization.

It was awful, overengineered design-by-committee mess.

This was only obvious to me in retrospect after I realized that these things didnt have to be complicated.

>no good GUI editors really emerged.

In those good old times both Oxygen and XML Spy were good enough, so I even purchased a license of Oxygen for myself and never felt the money were wasted.

>And some developers didn't understand the format and shoved stuff into attributes that should've been elements and vice versa.

This happened at such scale where we can say that it was UX problem of XML itself.