[DrDroop]

The funny thing about this discussing is that no one seems to care about the actual problem that is being solved by XML rather then just serialising and deserialising some data used by one piece of software. XML is mainly useful for exchanging data between organisations in a pre agreed format and schema where everyone is doing something else with the information. I'm implementing XBRL right now, and I can't say that I enjoy it, but I also wouldn't know how to do it better except maybe in some superficial way. Sure XML is bloated and maybe something like RDF/TTL would be better because of build in support for links, multiple languages and datatypes but that still leaves the problem of having to deal with whatever is expressed in a taxonomy that can be GB big.