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's easier to write a parser for an XML dialect than for an arbitrary one because of tools that are available.

Using a DOM parser, for example, is much simpler than lexx and yacc, especially in Java where it was popularized.