Omnifarious's Journal: XML is not the answer

I've been discovering how bad XML is for designing protocols. For some non-technical reasons, I decided to design my next protocol in XML, and taught myself a lot about it.

Aside from the bloatedness of a tag system, the main thing about XML that makes it totally unsuitable for protocol design is its lack of a decent way to do enveloping or encapsulation.

Most protocols will carry data that has nothing to do with the protocol. They will be used in some capacity as a transport. XML makes it very hard to design protocols that can do this easily.

Anyway, this is less well written than I hoped, but I think my point is clear. :-)