> I'm pretty sure IE5 predated XSLT.

I was talking about the need for backward compatibiliy and MS compatibility 
(vs. any true standard) when tring to get a website on-line, not about xml 
in general. Maybe I was not that clear. Somebody in chare is bound to have 
some stone-age browser installed and to complain loudly. I am so sick of 
this...

BTW: IE5 had XML and XSL support. Microsoft-style, at least. If you don't 
believe me, look at this:

http://www.amazon.com/XML-Programmers-Reference-Alex-Homer/dp/1861001576/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8

> The whole crap of "human readable" is bogus. None of it is human readable.

Yes and no. Depends on what you want to do. Here's a bit from the start of 
some CIV4 xml-file, which I'd call human readable, intuitively 
understandable and easy to modify. I could be done in different ways, too, 
of course.

<Civ4ArtDefines xmlns="x-schema:CIV4ArtDefinesSchema.xml">
<MovieArtInfos>
<MovieArtInfo>
<Type>ART_DEF_MOVIE_INTRO</Type>
<Path>Assets/Art/Movies/Intros/intro.bik</Path>
</MovieArtInfo>
  ...

>You at least need a text editor. Given that, you could probably write VI 
>and

Given your definition povray SDL is not human readable, too. You need at 
least a text editor ;-)

> The only real advantage of using it for data is that every language in the 
> world has support for at least primitive XML parsing, so it's easy to 
> serialize a tree of text.

YES! And that's exactly the reason I use it (when I use it). It is 
convenient, provided you have enough space and computing power.

BTW: Your post made me realize how much our field of view becomes narrowed 
down to our line of work. For me it's websites and small utility-programs 
that can be cooked up in a few days. So nowadays in my work I usually have 
sufficient computing power and hdd-space galore. But if you want to transfer 
data via SMS, XML is NOT a good way of doing things, of course. ;-)

Don't get me wrong. I am no fan of XML. But I have seen worse. And you are 
right about the general lack of documentation for data-file-formats. But 
even if you have the docs, you still need to write code to actually read and 
parse the files - with XML (and thanks to the extensive XML-support in many 
programming languages) I find it comparatively easy to read,write and modify 
third-party data-files which are done in XML.

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