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

another benefit of XML vs binary data is error resilliancy..

for binary data, if a single bit goes wrong, the data are most likely unusable, with xml, as a last resort, you can still open it up and make corrections...