I look at this and I see a visually-well-organized hierarchy of objects with properties and children. It's a sideways tree diagram. I honestly don't get what's supposed to be unappealing about it.
> Can you name any language any more unreadable than XML to help me?
Most of the other markup languages depending on the usecase. The "redundant" tags everywhere like </Address> in XML are very helpful if you're in the weeds of a big document that's taller than your viewport - you still know exactly what you're looking at and where in the hierarchy you are, as opposed to JSON or YAML which I find much easier to get lost in.
Anyone can pick up a (properly-named) XML document and tell what it means at a glance, but JSON is easily a mystery unless you know the implicit schema beforehand.
Maybe there's some minor friction to get past looking at XML because it's a little visually busy before you learn how to parse it out? Is that all there is to it?
I understand where you’re coming from because it’s true XML is going to perform the functions required without all the problems implicit with YAML’s “readable” syntax…
But I have worked with some very complex XML and I feel you’ve chosen a simpler to read example.
I have seen very complicated XML from Microsoft’s own configurations that is so large, long, and complicated that it is very hard to follow
I look at this and I see a visually-well-organized hierarchy of objects with properties and children. It's a sideways tree diagram. I honestly don't get what's supposed to be unappealing about it.
> Can you name any language any more unreadable than XML to help me?
Most of the other markup languages depending on the usecase. The "redundant" tags everywhere like </Address> in XML are very helpful if you're in the weeds of a big document that's taller than your viewport - you still know exactly what you're looking at and where in the hierarchy you are, as opposed to JSON or YAML which I find much easier to get lost in.
Anyone can pick up a (properly-named) XML document and tell what it means at a glance, but JSON is easily a mystery unless you know the implicit schema beforehand.
Maybe there's some minor friction to get past looking at XML because it's a little visually busy before you learn how to parse it out? Is that all there is to it?