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 is a text format that is one of it's major advantages. All binary formats are usually much smaller but you always need tools to "read" them. You can simply open and editor and modify XML files to your liking. However I'd argue it's stil a bloated format, but well you can compress it quite well.... if one looks at the specs for the Windows Office XML formats one just can imagine it's wonderful to be seemingly open....

Regards Friedrich