Over the last two years XML has matured into a widely accepted standard for exchanging data between organizations as well as internal applications within the company. XML's ease of use and wide availability has made XML parsers such as MSXML an easy choice for simple tasks like formatting configuration files and complex multi-tiered application architectures residing on different platforms.
The availability of such tools as XSL and the ServerXMLHTTP component only increase the popularity of XML, because they bring simplicity to very common development tasks.
All in all, use XML and enjoy the benefits -- but only when you really need it. For example, if you have a perfectly good SQL server database to store user accounts in, don't go creating a separate XML file to represent each user. Instead, use XML files to store chat transcript with clients, or some other data that does not need to be processed and available 24/7.
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