Interactive web pages-exactly what it’s used for in GMail. It was given the name XMLHttpRequest because it was a last-minute addition and the only way to get a feature into Internet Explorer that late in the product cycle was to make it XML-related. Which it obviously wasn’t, but that was how to get it approved. Source: Was a Microsoft employee at the time, though not on the IE team.
I always wondered. What happened to the team behind start.com ? At the time I thought it could have been a golden brand and the realization was slick, I remember reading they had a lot of freedom to experiment.
It could have totally owned much of the space now occupied by Yelp and Craigslist. A true class act Bill pulled the plug on far too early. One of his most egregious mistakes IMHO.
It's funny how in those days XML was also short hand for "make way guys, this is the future".
I thought it was a really overhyped and ugly way to represent data, but this did not seem like a popular thing to express. In retrospect, standardizing on something was probably a good thing for the time though.
-Perfectly readable to me, works fine with auto-collapse. Closing tag is complained about but it helps you keep track of what you're reading.
-Cleaner than "simpler" serialization formats in many cases, like putting type information in an attribute instead of something hacky like giving your json object a $type member. Ran into this myself serializing objects in an array of BaseClass where the class of the objects mattered, had to turn on a flag in the JSON library.
-Extensible when you need it, as the X stands for. As in the prior case, mapping extensions onto more rudimentary formats becomes hacky and less readable.
Obviously it's going to be easier to use JSON et al in some contexts but I never felt anything was inherently wrong with XML. XML is still probably more appropriate if you're storing a lot of metadata to your objects and you're not in a context like web dev where only other formats are treated as first-class.
There are some things I don't like about JSON. It's supposed to be easy for JS users because it's literally "JavaScript Object Notation" but it has annoying differences like requiring quotation marks around variable names and disallowing // comments. Not intuitive at all.