When is it OK to use an XML file to save information?

Question

What reason could there be for using an XML to save information?

Answer 1

There could be lots of reasons: like any other file format, it has pros and cons:

Pros:

• .Net natively supports serializing your objects to xml, and deserializing them back again.
• It is more readable and descriptive to the human eye than a binary format or JSON
• It is easily validated against a schema to ensure it is in the correct format.
• It can be loaded and parsed with other tools.
• It is easily interchangeable with other platforms/languages, unlike the native .Net binary serialization format
• It can be transformed, and you can run xpath over it.

Cons:

• It is more verbose than either the native .Net binary serialization format, or JSON
• It doesn't store type information about the classes that were deserialized into xml, whereas a the native binary format does.

Answer 2

It's a portable, parsable standard.

So if you have data that needs to be read by several different programs (and possibly people) you could use XML.

It is also relatively easy to validate and transform (via XSLT) into other formats.

Obviously you could use other formats, but that doesn't stop you using XML.