An angle bracket tax?

You ever hear that the lottery is an "idiot tax"? Angled brackets in the realm of programming are exactly the same thing. That's why I had to laugh out loud when I read the latest post on the Coding Horror about XML. It takes a special kind of idiot to admit that he's using XML for anything, and an even more special kind of idiot to write an entire blog post about it. This sentence struck me as especially relevant: "if it's stored in a text file and needs to be retrieved and parsed, it's probably XML.". I would word that a different way: "if it's stored in a text file and it's XML, you've got a shit career.". But that's just me; after all, all of the text stored in my /etc folder is in XML right? Oh shit, it's not? Nor are any of my application configs for that matter; I've been using YAML for five-plus years like any sane person. As for the "hot debates" over JSON and alternative formates, the crowd that has been fawning over Ruby on Rails, trend whores as they are, have already made this decision for you. Fight it all you want, but only Microsoft losers will be using XML in 2009. As a parting note, I'd like to suggest that if you're still using SOAP, you drop whatever you're doing right now and practice saying "Would you like fries with that?", you're gonna need it.