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> In my experience, anything XML-related seems to be the product of simplicity-hating architecture astronauts with zero consideration for efficiency, possibly as a way of justifying their existence and continued employment.

I am very confused by people who have emotional reactions to technologies. XML has a number of capabilities that are very difficult to represent in other documents without creating an unreadable mess. XML is more than just the worst SOAP api you've used.




> I am very confused by people who have emotional reactions to technologies.

Given the phrasing ("simplicity-hating architecture astronauts"), I suspect they're having an emotional reaction to a colleague who, at some point, advocated for their team's use of XML. Which I honestly think is slightly justified if their colleague's advocacy was thoughtless or otherwise unreasonable. Maybe JSON would actually work better for what they were doing. Of course, that said, I also say it's "slightly" justified because good ol' XML did nothing wrong.


......such as?

Xml is a hierarchical days structure that has less data hinting to parsers /serializes than json.

Please don't say namespaces. Broke xpath and other parsing techs. Attrs vs tags? Cdata? Any one remember ibm web services being all cdata tags?


The existence of closing tags makes tree structures much more convenient and ergonomical to represent.

Also the supporting XML tech is quite nice. Schema validation and translation is simple. It's also much simpler to parse.




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