Where is XML going?

I found the post by Kurt Cagle about current trends in XML fascinating..

Here's a summery I jotted down.
- rise of XML technologies - XSLT (XQuery and XForms are still a couple of years out from wide adoption) (and of couse job listings)
- XHTML becoming "standard" at least at the corporate level
- rise in demand for ontologists and RDF specialists (harnessing the ability to create metadata structures)
- transitional shift towards the declarative web architecture
- rise of JSON, E4X, Linq (unlikely that these languages will replace XML)
- XML Binding languages will be the next arena of development (and contention) - the ability to assign a behavior to an XML tag is profoundly useful, and provides both the bones of the declarative structures and the muscles of the imperative one, while keeping the presentation layer safely off to one side (AJAX).
- more commercial level XSLT2 transformations
- the interesting things being done in XML are increasingly occurring in the application and vertical markets
- HL7 in the health care field
- GML in the mapping and geographical location space
- XBRL or UBL in the business space
- while RDFa may have a fairly major hill to climb in terms of adoption, it will likely end up becoming integral to the semantic web fairly soon

Link: where is xml going?

Isn't this a good example about 'history repeats'?
The idea of declarative programming has been around for about half a century. Until I started to learn ML last year, I thought I knew fairly well about programming languages, which turned out to be wrong. Why is declarative programming in the form of Lisp, Haskell, ML, etc not commercially successful these days? The main reason might be that compared to imperative languages such as C, C++, Java, etc. it's harder to come up with a solution, at least initially or it may be that I am so used to imperative languages that I couldn't do away with it initially. Is there a marketing glitch attached to it as well (for not succeeding)? Having said all this, now we see a rise in XML declarative behavior bindings..isn't it a good example of 'history repeats'!