[matthewaveryusa]

Once you've peeked at the complexity of some of the xml parsers (like xerces, oh god xerces) undoubtedly you'll want to avoid it like the plague. xml can get crazy-bananas very quickly. I fundamentally don't understand xml (just like I don't understand asn1) for anything beyond historical purposes.

[aloisdg]

The Atom spec is really easy to grasp. Your platform may even include a way to deal with it ([.NET](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.servicemodel... for example)

[mindcrime]

There are definitely complexities in the XML ecosystem, like XLink, schemas, namespaces, etc. But in practice, not every application needs all that stuff, and when using the "common" parts of XML, I don't find it difficult to understand or work with. But that's just me.