When is it OK to use an XML file to save information?

Question

What reason could there be for using an XML to save information?

Answer 1

There could be lots of reasons: like any other file format, it has pros and cons:

Pros:

• .Net natively supports serializing your objects to xml, and deserializing them back again.
• It is more readable and descriptive to the human eye than a binary format or JSON
• It is easily validated against a schema to ensure it is in the correct format.
• It can be loaded and parsed with other tools.
• It is easily interchangeable with other platforms/languages, unlike the native .Net binary serialization format
• It can be transformed, and you can run xpath over it.

Cons:

• It is more verbose than either the native .Net binary serialization format, or JSON
• It doesn't store type information about the classes that were deserialized into xml, whereas a the native binary format does.