XML is the future
I recently had a project where I was munging some vendor xml so I get to have an opinion(python + lxml)<p>xml is not that bad. until you add namespaces. then it gets ugly real quick.<p>But I think the fundamental problem of xml is that it is trying to be two things. a markup language and a structured data object format. It started life as a markup language(text with interposed tags) however the lure of a well defined, human readable, flexable format proved too much and people started using it for object storage(mostly tags, never mixed tags and text)