The End of the XML Era?

In the late nineties XML was described as the solution to every data problem — it was going to bring a new era of integrated computing. And in many ways it has been a success, but its star is beginning to fade. There are three reasons:

• Speed: Processing XML is slow. It consists of parsing large blobs of text which is one of the slower operations a program can do.
• Ease of Use: It’s just not fun to write XML. It’s all angle brackets, namespaces and XSDs. Compare that to something like YAML and there’s just no comparison in terms ease of writing and reading.
• New Formats: New formats have appeared and are attracting developers left and right mainly JSON and YAML.

I think Jeremy Miller has a good summary of where developers are at on XML:

I did quite a bit of work in server side Java in 2007 and the only thing I remember is how much I hated all the freaking Xml cruft.  I don’t have anything against Xml in general, or at least for the things Xml was actually meant for in the first place, but I’m completely done with coding in Xml. 

So my question to you is can we declare the mid-2000′s fling with programming by Xml files to be a dead or dying trend?  Is there anyone out there that still believes in "just make it an Xml file so we can change things without compiling?

I totally agree. And when you look at the rails world, one of the big reasons that here people saying is that they were SO glad to finally be done with angle brackets.

After many years of fighting with XML in web service code and XML web.config files I wholeheartedly agree. Death to the angle brackets!