Comment by yarg

XML has been around for long enough that a lot of people have developed a tacit understanding of it, it's not reasonable in all cases (I once went to war with an 8000 line build.xml file - fuck everything about that), but for simple cases it's an easy to parse hierarchical format that most people who need to can get a handle on.

But there's one vestigial artefact that irks me.

    <tree>
        <leaf colour="green"/>
        <leaf colour="yellow"/>
    </tree>

Why can't I just do this? Validation and highlighting are well past the point where it should be a viable option.

    <tree>
        <leaf colour="green"/>
        <leaf colour="yellow"/>
    </>