Comment by IshKebab

The main thing I hate about XML (apart from the tedious syntax and terrible APIs - who thought SAX was a sane idea?) is that the data model is wrong for 99% of use cases.

XML gives you an object soup where text objects can be anywhere and data can be randomly stored in tags or attributes.

It just doesn't at all match the object model used by basically all programming languages.

I think that's a big reason JSON is so successful. It's literally the object model used by JavaScript. There's no weird impedance mismatch between the data represented on disk and in your program.

Then someone had to go and screw things up with YAML...

JSON5 is the way.