Yeah, the xml thing wasn't about how good xml is, just how terrible CSV is :).

Particularly for tabular data, parquet is really good. Even a SQLite database isn't a terrible way send that sort of data.

At least with XML, all the problems of escaping are effectively solved. And since it's (usually) tool generated it's likely valid. That means I can feed it into my favorite xml parser and pound the data out of it (usually). There's still a lot of the encoding issues I mentioned with CSV.