XML Is Too Hard For Programmers. Tim Bray, co-author of the XML spec gets in touch with his inner geek:
XML is a bouncing thriving five-year-old now, and yet I've been feeling unsatisfied with it, particularly in recent times. In particular in my capacity as a programmer.
I have another quote of Tim's:
“All XML is, is an efficient way to ship objects from point A to point B in a Web framework. That's all it does. That's all it was ever supposed to do. It has no data model. It's just a syntax!”
From Tim's programming discussion, XML doesn't sound very efficient to me either. Of course this does not devalue the importance of XML for semantic markup and as a data interchange format. It just means that the problems XML is meant to solve are hard to get right. [PHP Everywhere]