EDI never became a thing. One of the greatest selling points of HTML/XML/JSON is that they are human-readable. Even if gzip compressed, most tools will decompress automatically and show you the raw text.

So the tooling nor library support never came for EDI (i.e., Chrome, libxml, etc.)

Also, if you really wanna go full-throttle binary for speed, size, etc., you probably don't want something heavy like XML anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_data-serializati...