> but where is all the vitriol coming from? XML is fine if all you want is a human-readable format to define tree data structures such as documents to be used

> but where is all the vitriol coming from? XML is fine if all you want is a human-readable format to define tree data structures such as documents to be used in applications where only strings are used and someone within the use case needs to have the semantics of each node and each attribute spelled out quite clearly and unequivocally in the document structure itself. For any other case, XML is horrible. Now, consider that XML is used quite extensively in any other case beyond tree-based DOM data structures that it was designed for.