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

1. Schema definition languages - you can describe the expected format of the XML
2. It's a standard:) - it's definitely better than everybody using their own custom formats

CSV is human readable but that's really the only good thing about it - it's so inflexible, and there are no meanings assigned to the values. If I started designing a system now I would definitely use YAML instead - it's less bloated and it's definitely gaining momentum.