Good question. The point is that an XML document is sometimes a file, sometimes a record in a relational database, sometimes an object delivered by an Object Request Broker, and sometimes a stream of bytes arriving at a network socket.
These can all be described as "data objects". """
I would ask what part of that, or of the simple phrase "data object", or even of the basic concept of a markup language, doesn't cry out "data interchange metalanguage" to you?
Actually I don't see any explicit mention that XML was meant to be limited to data interchange only.
"data object" has to do with more than data interchange. There is data entry as well. And people are having to hand enter XML files all the time for things like Ant, XHTML, etc.
I guess all those people who learned how to write web pages by hand were violating some spec and so they have no cause to complain about any difficulties doing so. Tim Berners-Lee never intended people to have to type in URLs, either, but here we are.
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