[rcxdude]

Indeed. XML gets a lot of hate because it's so difficult to use. It would be fine if you could use it without having to care about the 100 features you don't care about and just use the ones you need, but pretty much every library I've seen makes parsing (or generating) a document a huge and complicated task, and most of it is completely irrelevant to the problem I'm trying to solve.

And because of this almost no-one bothers to actually handle it properly so you often can't actually use the advanced features even if you wanted to.

[rossjudson]

This varies greatly from framework to framework, and language to language. On the JVM at least, the dark machinery that handles the XML is rather rigorously correct. Parsing and generation are trivial, especially using JAXP. You have multiple ways of working with XML (objects, DOM, push, pull).

XML is "good enough" for a lot of cases. There are lots of tools to mess around with it too, which is really quite valuable when you're experimenting with various kinds of data or you're debugging. Being able to extract out stuff you're interested in XML format means you can perform a lot of complex manipulations quite easily.