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I am not the one to promote XML, far from it, but the tooling for it is superb. Like, recently, we had to connect our (Java) app to NetSuite web service. All it took is to point to their web service endpoint, and the tool created strongly-typed (Java) client classes and proxies. That is in Java, and it works with C#, too (Visual Studio). Provide the endpoint, VS reads the WSDL exposed by the service, and generates all the required classes and proxies. And at all times, you see what functions the web service is exposing, and what parameters you need to send, and what kind of response you will get.

Much better then your typical REST API.



Hmm. Point taken, but this is more of a WSDL thing than an XML thing, is it?


So it does everything you want, with ease, in every language, better than everything else, but you won't promote it?


True. What happened was, back in the 2000-something, XML was so hyped that people pushed XML as a solution for everything.

On the negative side, we had to endure managers coming back from “XML conferences” and recommending we ditch our

Oracle or Sybase or whatever and replace it with an XML database, because XML.

On the plus side, vendors made sure to support it so to this day we have good tooling in Eclipse, VS, etc.

Also on the bad side they have gone crazy overboard so we have security issues like this:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XML_External_Entity_(XXE)_Pr...

So I still have WS endpoint but I rewrote it to manually parse XML and avoid all the crappy extensions that they put in and I cannot disable.

So yeah, this is loaded… I am not promoting XML. It has its issues. Use what you like.


Your complaint is about people who don't know what XML is and how to use it and broken tools, not XML. XML does not cause any of the examples you show.




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