Comment by sharpneli
11 years ago
Or someone else has used it to solve the wrong problem.
Or your customer demands you to solve the wrong problem with XML.
A nice example: Simple configuration files which are best described as simply option=value or maybe json if someone wants to go really wild.
A customer comes and wants configuration files to be XML. Then your sales department agrees and now you have to implement XML files. The end result: Configuration files are no longer easily editable by humans. Yay!
Another example: Someone decided that using makefiles is too hard, so let's make the equivalent but with XML! I'm looking at you ant! Now they're still have the same problems as makefiles but they are much harder to edit.
In my experience
* Configuration files are best made with YAML (it's the most human readable).
* APIs / other forms of serialization/deserialization over a network are best done with JSON (chop it in half and it will fail fast unlike yaml. still fairly readable tho).
* Programming languages (like ant) should not be written in either one ever (fortunately I've never heard of a YAML or JSON based language).
* XML does a bad to terrible job of all three.