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

It's cross platform. We use it to encode robot control program and data running in C under VxWorks for execution, but our off line programming is done under dot net. XML is easily parsed by both.