Whoa, you have taken my message a lot more personally than I intended my tone to land. I mean, I was being a little bit snippy about technology, but it wasn't

Whoa, you have taken my message a lot more personally than I intended my tone to land. I mean, I was being a little bit snippy about technology, but it wasn't meant at all as a personal attack. Sorry if it came off that way. I wasn't meaning to say that you were unaware of Protocol Buffers, my argument is just Protocol Buffers do achieve most of what XML is trying to achieve, and I think many people don't appreciate that most of the complexity of XML is not inherent to the problem domain, but rather a product of an over-engineered technology stack that is not a good match for the problems to which it is usually applied. A person who is marking up a text document, like with DocBook, has (in my opinion) the best argument for using XML. For more data structure-oriented programming like SVG or web APIs, I believe Protocol Buffers are better in every way, and I think I can defend that argument in rigorous debate. If you go to the XML Schema website and print up the two specs there (Part 1 and Part 2), the printed spec is 371 pages. I think it is difficult to make the argument that it is "profoundly simple." The JSON RFC, at 10 pages, would deserve that characterization.