XML has always felt to me as both a great and a terrible idea, at the same time. The fact it's built around schemas is great, and this makes it way better at r

XML has always felt to me as both a great and a terrible idea, at the same time. The fact it's built around schemas is great, and this makes it way better at representing serialized structured data on a file than JSON and anything schemaless. On the other hand though, it has perhaps one of the worst syntaxes known to man. I dread reading and writing complex stuff in XML (Plists are one of the worst offenders), as it is often true that a lack of thought at time of schema definition can causes terrible readability problems that tend to linger for years. People are often in a hurry when releasing a new piece of software, and XML makes very easy for a hasty developer to overcomplicate things. Certain pieces of XML basically require you to edit them through the GUI tool that created them, and the punishment for not doing so is having to recover a completely messed up XML file. I am personally a strong believer in the idea that a text file MUST be easy to edit by hand, because someone will always try opening it up in Vim and edit it that way. If a given file format forces you to use (de jure or de facto) a specific program to edit it safely, it should be using a binary representation instead. Binary files are often smaller, and have the unintended additional bonus of making the file not editable in a text editor.