Jeff Atwood has hit the nail firmly on the flat bit with his post XML: The Angle Bracket Tax.

I spend a disproportionate amount of my time wading through an endless sea of angle brackets and verbose tags desperately searching for the vaguest hint of actual information. It feels wrong.

Indeed. I have recently been wading through configuration files which use XML as their format of choice. This is “a bad thing”, especially when XML is being kludged into pseudo-programming language behavior. There is simply no way that XML can be sensibly made to handle if-then-else constructs.

UPDATE: I had a genuine LOL at this comment by ‘Mo’:

XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you’re not using enough of it.