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Alaric B. Snell wrote: [a whole lot of stuff] I think one advantage XML offers over things like TSV and XDR is a certain measure of future-proofing. Change your RDBMS data dictionary and TSV instances out the wild often become toast. Same thing for XDR - in fact direct object serialization is almost always *wrong*. Anyhow, because XML has all these verbose labels saying what each chunk is, it tends to be more change-resistant than most of what has come before. Another big difference is the Unicode handling. I think XML has a qualitatively healthier relationship with internationalized information than most other things out there. The third one is the built-in explicitly written easy-to-understand easy-to-implement error-handing semantics. There's other stuff, but for my money these are the three reasons why XML suddenly got traction where a lot of other well-designed stuff didn't. None of them are absolutes, but put together they hit an important sweet spot. -Tim
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