I'm beginning to think that XML files are more useful than I've given them credit for being, though that's not saying much. Let's say I have some data stored in a file for an app I make today. Five years from now, I have the same app about five versions' worth of changes further down the line. For some strange reason, I want to create a second application that can sync *any* version of my first app up to some third party application's information. Well, now I have something of an anonymous client that wants to access with my data file from five years ago -- it just happens to be me, five years later. If I've rolled my own file format, obviously there's a chance I broke bkwds compat and have to write my interface today for the 3rd party application twice. With XML, there's a much better chance that if I blast in fields the five year old app doesn't understand, it'll still keep chugging along, and will have saved me work.

Enough that I'm happy I used XML before? Quite possibly so, especially if I just vomited XML with code rather than bothered to use a full parser, etc.

Or perhaps the fact that I only got 3.5 hours sleep last night has finally caught up with me.