A little bit of a rant. I think that many of the comments to this article, as usual, show a mistaken view of XML. XML and verbosity. You'd think that now that XML's been around for a while what it's good for and what it's not would have sunk in more. Too many people seem to disucss use of XML thinking only of single user desktop applications, they assume that they control all of the uses of the data, or that they will be the only people writing or parsing it.

In my opinion the greatest reason for using XML is that there are more interesting and useful things to be programming than a parser for yet another data format. If you use a standard parser then that's one less thing to worry about and maintain, and it's one less thing to have to teach users or developers of your software about.