[danbruc]

I have to second this, I do not understand why XML receives so much hate. Sure it is verbose und editing it without, at the very least, good syntax highlighting can be a bit of a pain. And namespaces. But just use a good XML editor and the pain is gone. And in return you get a mature and powerful ecosystem where communicating data formats and validating data with XSDs or transforming data with XSLTs is done easily. And you have to write almost no code if your language has a decent XML library. Serialization and deserialization is usually easy and there are tools for generating matching classes for your schemas. I am not really following the development of other serialization formats like JSON, but as far as I can tell at least the JSON ecosystem is essentially coming up with analog ideas like JSON schema to solve the same problems that XML has already solved.