[wpietri]

Hm. In his introduction, he says, "XML is touted as an external format for representing data." To me that mostly misses the value of XML. I think of it as an interchange format, not a closely-mirror-my-datastructures format. I've used it before when I want a long-lived data format that is mostly annotated text, and I'd happily do it again.

That said, I'm very skeptical of the XML-for-everything school, and nearly murdered a group of engineers who were using XML to transfer data from one spot in an app to another, even though it all ran in the same JVM. So maybe I'm more defending a small subset of XML rather than the XML-industrial complex.