The article misses the mark, but XML--the language itself, not the tooling--does have an advantage: it is designed to be quite good at one thing that's often ne

The article misses the mark, but XML--the language itself, not the tooling--does have an advantage: it is designed to be quite good at one thing that's often neglected despite being in its name: extensibility. XML provides enormous flexibility via namespaces and integrating many schemas that your application may or may not understand in one document. When done correctly, it can be a huge win in interoperability in heterogeneous environments and across versions. That said, you could very well argue its additional complexity is often not worth the gain in most applications. Of course, you can also define your own extensibility/interoperability conventions with any data serialization format, but the point is XML has it baked in the standard and already provides an accepted way of doing things that everyone has implemented.