> It's a perfectly reasonable choice: flexible, well specified, well supported, reasonably performant. I think the extreme level of hype 20 years ago was overdone and (just like with anything) there's good ways to adopt it and bad ways. But as a basic technology choice, it's fine.

Absolutely with you up to here, but...

> Particularly these days when you can have a coding agent write the parser boilerplate, etc. for you.

Absolutely not. Having seen the infinite different ways a naive implementation of XML goes wrong, arguably being one of the main causes of death for XHTML because browsers rightfully rejected bad XML, "Don't roll your own XML implementation" should be right up there with "Don't roll your own crypto".

I don't feel like it's going out on a limb to say that if someone needs to defer to a LLM to implement XML they're not qualified to determine if it's done it right and/or catch what it got enthusiastically wrong.