Does XML Suck? I don’t think so.

I ran across this link in the ‘popular’ section of del.icio.us this morning, Does XML Suck?
Prior to having found that article I had just finished a conference call with Google and a client about a project that would utilize Google Earth for an upcoming event. The client wanted to use Google Earth so that viewers could ‘go’ the the event location and see live image feeds of the event. What a cool idea.
“Can we do this?”, my boss said.
“Sure, why not?”, I replied.
Like many companies now, Google provides a public API for working with Google Earth and it’s version of XML – KML. With KML, you just change the tags as needed, changing values, references, location titles, etc.
Along with Google and its use of KML, Adobe has also been working with a simliar approach with its program, Flex (as of this writing version 2.0).
From Adobe’s website:

Adobe® Flex™ 2 software is a rich Internet application framework based on Adobe Flash® that will enable you to productively create beautiful, scalable applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform.

My friend sent me this link where you can experiment with a Flex Compiler, which utilizes MXML (I don’t know for sure, but this probably stands for Macromedia XML), obviously, the markup looks very familiar.
Prior to learning about XML I worked extensively with XML in many Flash applications and websites I’ve built (I-Travel Shoes, my portfolio site, Richard Felber Photography, Filigrana by Zani to name a few). XML provides me with a way to update and maintain Flash sites without having to crack up FLA files again and again for clients that want revisions to their sites.
So does XML suck? Not for me.
XML reference files for my links above:
http://clients.thecombustionchamber.com/itravel/collections.xml
http://thecombustionchamber.com/6/_xml/menu_tcc.xml
http://thecombustionchamber.com/6/_xml/news.xml
http://richardfelberphotography.com/_xml/images.xml
http://filigranabyzani.com/filigrana.xml
http://filigranabyzani.com/collection.xml