Before XML became a standard and given all its shortcomings, what made XML so popular?

Question

Yes XML is human readable but so is comma delimited text and properties files.

XML is bloated, hard to parse, hard to modify in code, plus a ton of other problems that I

Answer 1

Do you remember the days before XML became popular? Data just wasn't easily interchangeable -- one program would take .csv files, the next .xls, the next EBSIDIC-formatted files. XML has its weaknesses, but it's structured, which makes it parsable and transformable.

As you point out, CSV files are pretty portable. However, there's no meaning to them. What does column(14) mean to me? As opposed to ?