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

Some inherent qualities of XML that make it so popular and useful:

1. XML represents a tree, and tree-like structures are a very common pattern in programming. This is an evolutionary leap from record-based representations like CSV, made possible by today's cheap computing power and bandwidth.

2. XML strikes a good balance between human factors (it is plain text, and fairly legible) and computing practicalities (terseness, ease in parsing, expressiveness, extensibility, etc).