[trezor]

He said: With XML, we can easily agree and collaborate on a format and both of our languages have builtin libraries to extract the data we need.

You replied: OK, I'm going to send you a list using XML.

The only thing you have proved here is that your blind hatred for XML makes you unable to read and parse what is posted.

When arguing against the evils of a standardised format which there are proper parsers for everywhere, failing to parse stuff yourself is probably not on the list of things you want to do.

[sah]

You missed the point. After you've agreed on XML, you still have to agree on how to represent a list. You can use existing libraries to parse the XML, but you still have to write a parser to transform the resulting DOM into a list.

Plus, given that the availability of good XML parsers is one of the primary advantages claimed for XML, can anyone name some XML parsers that aren't ridiculously slow? Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but I always seem to find that my own code to parse ad-hoc formats goes 10x faster than, e.g., expat parsing XML.

[trezor]

You missed the point. After you've agreed on XML, you still have to agree on how to represent a list.

No I didn't. Because that's exactly what the guy in the OP said. Agree on a XML schema for the data. After you've done that, writing some simple Xpath to get your data is done in minutes.

The only times my XML code is 100% DOM is when I need to make things from scratch or do XML data manipulation.