I've done my fair share of systems integrations and the number of teams that did not know xml or have never used it in a professional settings was around 20%. Of those who did use it a staggering amount of people never understood namespaces and started testing for equality on the element name and namespace prefix string instead of the namespace declaration. When somebody claims they "know" xml I initially treat it as a developer saying that he/she knows 'sql' while reviewing their code and seeing them do joins in the application logic.

That is the problem with XML, there is so much logic that is needed in the application so to be able to understand it. You just need so much knowledge.

It depends on what age you are and whether you work with documents. If you started working in the industry past 2010 and didn't have to work with generating/reading (X)HTML/OOXML/ODF than it's rather likely you've never had an experience with XML (fortunately SOAP was deprecated very quickly).

> Maybe you could plausibly say that people have been soured on XML by ill-conceived uses for it that don't demonstrate its strengths... but you think most people have never worked with it? Come on.

https://truelist.co/blog/software-development-statistics/

So, according to the link - The average software developer age is between 25 and 34 years.

I think we should also define - are we talking about people who have worked with XML because they made a google site settings xml file OR people who have done serious work with XML and know what they're talking about?

First type - pretty much everyone.

Second type - not very many. I'm pretty much the only person who knows anything about XML wherever I go.

if you are 25 you have probably not done anything with XML or at least not anything important.

If you are 34 you might have, but I mean the last time I did anything really important with XML was 2013, I did a few other things since then because I knew XML was the best solution but that was me or because there was a very niche thing I was doing and the company was providing an XML api.

I bet most of the age 34s have not done anything meaningful with XML either, even though if you are 34 I suppose you probably had some ticket at some point that took you a week and you thought wow, my extensive experience with XML now gives me the right to grouse about how bad it is! If only everybody knew as much as I the world would be a better place!

on edit: my example of google site settings file is an example of some trivial usage, not meaning that pretty much everyone has done that exact trivial usage.

I am 34 and I feel like when I started at this job we were still going through the “everything must be XML” hangover. But hey there’s always a higher mountain.