Yes, XML is a big annoyance. But let me give you a bigger one: Json.<p>XML&#x27;s saving grace was that it came with good schemas out of the box, so turning something from XML to, say, a Java object, was not very difficult. It wasn&#x27;t difficult to use a SOAP service without having to do manual serialization work.<p>Today though, we are using something that has, at best, extremely weak types, and with schema equivalents that are bolted on, rarely used, and end up relying on humans understanding exactly what the data looks like, just for serialization&#x2F;deserialization. I guess you can live with that easily if you are writing in a language that has really weak types in the first place, as you&#x27;d have to read the documentation anyway (What date format is the field using? Better go read about it), but the moment you try to do something even slightly more sturdy, the process is excruciatingly painful.<p>Heck, even tools like try to &quot;help&quot; document APIs, like swagger, end up with specifications that chill the bones.<p>It is as if the web was built for and by people that are absolutely allergic to both specification and types: In a more sensible world, we&#x27;d get something like: If the RDS is postgres, then the data format is like this, and if it&#x27;s MySQL, it&#x27;s like this instead. But what we have out there in the world is big lists of optional fields that will be illegal, or ignored, or who knows what.<p>I was a big XML hater, back in the days of SOAP, but the more I see how services are defined today, the better the old rust bucket looks.