Before XML became a standard and given all its shortcomings, what made XML so popular?

Question

Yes XML is human readable but so is comma delimited text and properties files.

XML is bloated, hard to parse, hard to modify in code, plus a ton of other problems that I

Answer 1

It has many advantages, and few shortcomings. The main problem is the increased size of file and slower processing. However, there are advantages:

• it is structured, so you write a parser only once
• it supports data with nested structure (hierarchies, trees, etc.)
• you can embed multiple types of data structure in a single XML
• you can describe the schema (data types, etc.) with standard language (XSL...)