XML again

For the second time today, I've seen an assertion of mine on this blog made by someone much more authoritative.

Me, October 05:
XML is a text format for arbitrary hierarchically-structured data. That's not a difficult problem. I firmly believe that I could invent one in 15 minutes, and implement a parser for it in 30, and that it would be superior in every way to XML.

James Clark, Friday:
.. any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML.

via Tim Bray, who explains that James Clark "was designated Technical Lead of the original XML Working Group and is the single largest contributor to the design of XML", and also points out the reason XML is a poor data format is that he and Clark and the rest designed it as a document format, not an arbitrary data format.

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