I mean, we're not going back to xml anyhow; and xml is considerably older anyhow, so this is a pretty hypothetical case. But I'd posit that most - but not all

I mean, we're not going back to xml anyhow; and xml is considerably older anyhow, so this is a pretty hypothetical case. But I'd posit that most - but not all - of the issues with xml config files have little to do with xml per se, and everything to do with the crazily detailed stuff people squeezed in it. You don't have to stick everything in a namespace, and nest even trivial things 3 deep with annotations for obvious types. And if you do those things in json it turns into a mess too. SOAP is a perfect example of that. But: just because soap is messy doesn't imply xml everywhere has to be that. But sure, xml has some downsides. Then again, so does json. Oh well!