Hmm...since XML is a meta-language describing a family of markup language[1], every actual XML-based language will be a "subset".
And of course that is why some of the XML tools are so heavy: they deal with the full meta-format. The "nice" thing about JSON is that it doesn't have this indirection step, it's just one concrete language, and that's why it is simple. But again, it's trivially easy to define an actual concrete markup language using XML that is just as simple.
I agree with you that the choice of <key>theKey</theKey><string>value</string> rather than <theKey>value</theKey> was regrettable, had I designed the format I would have chosen differently. I think they wanted one DTD to describe this format, which wouldn't have been possible without keeping the meta-level indirection.
I created XML-based archivers for Cocoa that don't have this problem[2]. Again, this wasn't hard, and the API is NSKeyedArchiver compatible, so [MPWXMLArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:someObject]; gets you a nice XML representation.
And of course that is why some of the XML tools are so heavy: they deal with the full meta-format. The "nice" thing about JSON is that it doesn't have this indirection step, it's just one concrete language, and that's why it is simple. But again, it's trivially easy to define an actual concrete markup language using XML that is just as simple.
I agree with you that the choice of <key>theKey</theKey><string>value</string> rather than <theKey>value</theKey> was regrettable, had I designed the format I would have chosen differently. I think they wanted one DTD to describe this format, which wouldn't have been possible without keeping the meta-level indirection.
I created XML-based archivers for Cocoa that don't have this problem[2]. Again, this wasn't hard, and the API is NSKeyedArchiver compatible, so [MPWXMLArchiver archivedDataWithRootObject:someObject]; gets you a nice XML representation.
[1] http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/10/guide0.html?page=2
[2] https://github.com/mpw/Objective-XML/blob/master/MPWXmlArchi...