July 5, 2026
Tag, you’re it
Do you hate XML? (2010)
The internet’s old file format feud is back, and the comments are gloriously petty
TLDR: The writer says XML, a tag-heavy way of storing and sharing information, was overhyped, overused, and then unfairly demonized. In the comments, people split between “it’s just ugly” and “it was abused by bloated systems,” with one unforgettable prediction that XML could return “like vinyl.”
A 2010 essay about whether people really hate XML — a long-used way of wrapping data in lots of opening and closing tags — has turned into a full-blown nostalgia fight, with the comments doing what comments do best: turning a thoughtful academic debate into a deliciously messy culture war. The original writer says he once loved XML with near-religious zeal, then mellowed out, arguing that the real issue isn’t blind hatred but the awkward reality of growing up with a technology and seeing both its flaws and strengths. Very mature! The crowd, however, showed up ready to throw tomatoes.
The loudest reaction? “It’s not evil, it’s just ugly”. One camp says XML gets blamed for the wrong things: yes, it’s wordy, yes, it causes “angle bracket fatigue,” but that’s mostly an aesthetics problem. Another camp is far less forgiving, arguing XML was built for marking up documents, not everyday data, and that it created endless annoying choices and needless complexity. Then came the real villain of the comments: not XML itself, but the bloated corporate mess built around it in the 2000s — especially SOAP, which one commenter basically rebranded as “complex object access protocol” for maximum shade.
And because no internet fight is complete without a prophecy, one commenter dropped the funniest line in the thread: XML will be back like vinyl. Which is either a joke, a warning, or the most cursed prediction in tech nostalgia.
Key Points
- •The author says they spent roughly fifteen years working on interoperability, portability, data longevity, and library metadata, much of it involving XML.
- •The article describes a shift from early strong advocacy of XML during its hype cycle to a more moderate but still favorable view of XML for data modeling.
- •It cites a 2004 presentation by Chris Anderson, summarized by Jeff Barr, arguing that XML requires specialized tools such as XSLT and pushes developers toward domain expertise.
- •The author argues that the need for domain expertise is not unique to XML and also applies to SQL, object-relational modeling, and fields such as bibliographic data and natural language processing.
- •The article states that XML's key advantage over RDBMSs is an interoperable transfer syntax, while much XML data is ultimately stored in relational databases.