> But there is a sweet spot for semistructured documents where I would say XML still has the edge, because you don't have to quote text and errors in structure

> But there is a sweet spot for semistructured documents where I would say XML still has the edge, because you don't have to quote text and errors in structure are much easier to identify. No argument—as a markup language, XML is find (not perfect, but fine); it's a better markup language than either JSON or S-expressions. But as a data encoding, it's far inferior to JSON and S-expressions. > See "XML Is Not S-Expressions" for a deeper treatment of the question. Yeah, I've read it. He's right that XML is better for documents; he's wrong that the benefits of integrating data and document encoding are worth the pain of XML.