On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 2:28 PM, Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:

Nope. The next choice will be YAML 2. Then the next choice will be
JSON 1. Then the next choice will be JSON 2. Then the next choice will
be native serialization in your language of choice. Then custom binary
serialization. Then a continually permutating algorithmic mixing
stream, just for laughs. There are infinite alternatives to XML and if
worse comes to worst, I suggest hard transcoding your data into COBOL
statements and serializing those in Base63.

XML is a pain to write by hand, for sure. But one shouldn't be doing that. There are perfectly good libraries for working with XML in almost every programming language. It's a bit over-engineered, but one really can represent almost any sort of data as XML. (Whether that's a good idea is a whole different question.)

YAML is a lot easier to write a small file by hand, but it's kinda brittle & easy to fuck up. Not nearly as expressive as XML either. Great for small config files; imho not so great for most other things.

JSON strikes a nice balance between expressiveness and human readability. That's probably why REST (or if you eschew buzzwords, JSON over HTTP) is so popular these days.