> On 26 Jun 2018, at 13:39, Peter Flynn <peter@s...> wrote:
>
> ...I am
> now starting to hear people saying that XML should never have been used
> for rectangular data in the first place — except that it was new and
> sexy at the time, and Microsoft were big enough to plug it.
>

It wasn't adopted for that purpose because it was new and sexy, or because of Microsoft backing, it was adopted because the only real alternative at the time was CSV which was hopelessly fragile. People were quite right to adopt XML for that use case even though it was over-engineered for the job. But that was 1998...

Michael