• Let me start by saying that XML has been overhyped, and MS is guilty of much of that. Since the big XML push of several years back, the first time I found a practical use for it was this year as way of writing out some meta-data that needed to be re-parsed. For this purpose, it saved me countless hours of writing a custom parser. (The application was to write out the definition and data from Access tables to XML so that they could be stored in a Version Control system - XML provided a great way to write these files and also recreate the tables easily from the XML.)

    That said, I do think the self-documenting nature of XML is a big plus. Having a universal format for data exchange is nice in theory but practically, I'm not sure how 'universal' it really is. As dcpeterson has pointed out, you can use any format as long as the recipient and sender know what they are doing.

    Overall, I think XML is one more tool in the toolbox, but is not the great end-all be-all of data exchange and storage.