It was not intended as a criticism of XML at all. XML is a perfectly cromulent standard. It is a criticism of amateurish use of XML.

Which is everywhere (xhtml, anyone?)

The "X" is for "extreme", right?

There are very few websites where xhtml is served with a proper MIME type. MIME type triggers xml parsing mode in browsers, so in most cases xhtml is treated exatly as deserved: just a tag soup.

Yea but I've been using haml for quite a while to generate markup. XML is horribly inefficient by comparison and prone to mistakes.

XML is so complex and obtuse that one can hardly blame the practicioners for misusing it.

XML is obtuse only when you try to read definitions of XML dialects written in XML dialects themselves; even then, it's understandable, though it is a "high-art" discipline of schema-world semantics.

I agree that <tag attribute="value">data</tag> is simple, but XML is, unfortunately, much more than that. And this article complains about that "much more" part.

I'll agree with your agreement; the human legibility of XML data often leads the novice programmer into making bad assumptions about the simplicity of implementing XML.

While it is possible to implement "well-formed" XML easily enough, validating against schema is another matter. In this particular article's case, the "well-formedness" isn't even there.

For one-off, transport xml it's not much more. It's proper escaping, declaration with character set and not using features you do not know how to use. First two are solved by using proper library, third - by common sense