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That's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction, IMO.

Problem: the computer systems we use are insufficiently flexible/too flexible, encouraging the use of N different ways of serializing data.

Solution: make a computer system which encourages centralizing the mechanism by which data is serialized.

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New problem: Data serialization is now centralized and there are N ways of converting between the centralized way it's been serialized and everyone's incompatible structural needs.

Hey, at least then we've improved the format conversion problem from O(N^2) to O(N). :)

In practice, though, you end up with something like XML, which (to steal a phrase, I wish I could remember where I read it) is less a common language than it is an alphabet. I guess it's better than CSV.

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