I have lots of biases against XML. For me it is nearly personified as Steve Balmer. However, it is rather funny to see people who hate XML yet love html (or even more absurd XAML). The autocomplete feature makes XML somehow not completely horrible as you can easily define a schema and get a kind of mini language with zero effort. Eventually the mind removes the tags and you are just left with the content. However, I see text formats that describe tree structures are all fundamentally the same. It is impossible for json, yaml to be waaaay better than XML as it is the exact same thing.