Comment by da_chicken

No, the problem with attributes is that people consistently misuse them. So many things about XML break down when you make everything a self closing tag with 50 attributes. So many programmers just seem to say, "oh, it's shorter text so it must be inherently better" or "oh it's one-to-one so I should strictly avoid anything resembling a heirarchy."

Like I think this guy is mostly correct in identifying bad XML: https://www.devever.net/~hl/xml

Though I don't necessarily agree with the "data format" framing. This idea that markup languages are not data formats seems confused.

> They don't. You absolutely don't need a schema. If you declare a schema, it should exist. If not, no problem?

I agree that they should not.

However, I have used many tools that puke when presented with XML fragments or XML with no schema.