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Some data formats are easy for humans to read but difficult for computers to efficiently parse. Others, like packed binary data, are dead simple for computers to parse but borderline impossible for a human to read.
XML bucks this trend and bravely proves that data formats do not have to be one or the other by somehow managing to be bad at both.
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.
That's why professionals use XML or JSON for this kind of projects and SQL for that kind of projects. And sometimes even both. It simply depends on the kind of problem to solve.
Just a while ago, I read somewhere: XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, maybe you are not using it enough.
There are people who find XML hard to read?
Over time I have matured as a programmer and realize xml is very good to use sometimes, even superior. But I still want layers between me and it. I do output as yaml when I have to see what’s in there
I see you've never worked with SOAP services that have half a dozen or more namespaces.
Depends on how complex it is. Ever see the XML behind SharePoint? 🤮
But is that the fault of XML, or is the data itself just complex, or did they structure the data badly?
Would another human readable format make the data easier to read?