The thing is, it was never really intended as a storage format for plain data. It's a markup language, so you're supposed to use it for describing complex documents, like it's used in HTML for example. It was just readily available as a library in many programming languages when not much else was, so it got abused for data storage a lot.

Strong competition from yaml and json on this point however

Disagree. I prefer XML for config files where the efficiency of disk size doesn't matter at all. Layers of XML are much easier to read than layers of Json. Json is generally better where efficiency matters.

This is what happens when stack overflow is used for training.

Except for obvious typos

zipped xml!

If you are writing it then you are doing it wrong.

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

...and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

I’m sorry which LLM is this?

It's perplexity.ai. I like it because it doesn't require an account and because it can search the internet. It's like microsoft's bing but slightly less cringe.

How’d you get that out of it?

The screenshot is fake. I used Inspect Element.

I disagree, with a passion.

It is soooo cluttered, so much useless redundant tags everywhere. Just give JSON or YAML or anything really but XML...

But to each their own i guess.

I think we did a thread about XML before, but I have more questions. What exactly do you mean by "anything can be a tag"?

It seems to me that this:

<address>
    <street_address>21 2nd Street</street_address>
    <city>New York</city> 
    <state>NY</state>
    <postal_code>10021-3100</postal_code>
</address>

Is pretty much the same as this:

  "address": {
    "street_address": "21 2nd Street",
    "city": "New York",
    "state": "NY",
    "postal_code": "10021-3100"
  },

If it branches really quickly the XML style is easier to mentally scope than brackets, though, I'll give it that.