XML has its own Advantages and disadvantages. It is often depended on the complexity of the application, ability of the user etc., The following is the list of Advantages and disadvantages
Advantages of XML
It's self-documenting format describes structure and field names as well as specific values. The code is much more legible to a person coming into the environment with no prior knowledge. In the above example, it is obvious that 002 represents an ID whereas
002 might not.
It is an extendable language. It can represent the most general computer science data structures: records, lists and trees and It can represent most complex data structures also.
It's Unicode representation helps representing a wide variety of characters in its data
The strict syntax and parsing requirements make the necessary parsing algorithms extremely simple, efficient, and consistent.
The hierarchical structure is suitable for most (but not all) types of documents.
XML Documents can be converted to any other format easily, and because of this XML is popular for data exchange between applications
It is platform-independent, thus relatively immune to changes in technology.
Disadvantages of XML
XML syntax is redundant or large relative to binary representations of similar data.The redundancy may affect application efficiency through higher storage, transmission and processing costs.
XML syntax is verbose relative to other alternative 'text-based' data transmission formats. And because of this data size and processing time can increase.
No intrinsic data type support: XML provides no specific notion of "integer", "string", "boolean", "date", and so on.
The hierarchical model for representation is limited in comparison to the relational model or an object oriented graph.
XML namespaces are problematic to use and namespace support can be difficult to correctly implement in an XML parser.
XML is commonly depicted as "self-documenting" but this depiction ignores critical ambiguities.
