XML is a markup language

Why are people using XML as a slow, bloated ENTERPRISE database? XML is a markup language for documents or for objects designed to be embedded in documents. DocBook, XHTML, ODF, MathML and SVG are good uses of XML. Except for SVG, these are all marked up text. The text between the tags is usually more important than the tags. Consider a text board thread without tags. It's still readable. An HTML document without tags is plain text without any formatting, scripts, images or other elements. Hierarchical databases are not marked up text documents.

PROTIP: If you strip all the tags and don't get a plain text version of the document, don't use XML.

The silliest thing about XML is that it didn't bother to carry over some little things from SGML, such as </>. Yes, the old ass markup meant for storing human publications has a </> shorthand as well as <tag/stuff inside the tag/ which is as compact as things will get anyway, and the recent machine oriented format that people send terabytes of shit with doesn't.