• It is a simultaneously human and machine-readable format;
• It supports Unicode, allowing almost any information in any written human language to be communicated;
• It can represent the most general computer science data structures: records, lists and trees;
• Its self-documenting format describes structure and field names as well as specific values;
• The strict syntax and parsing requirements make the necessary parsing algorithms extremely simple, efficient, and consistent.

XML is also heavily used as a format for document storage and processing, both online and offline, and offers several benefits:

• Its robust, logically-verifiable format is based on international standards;
• The hierarchical structure is suitable for most (but not all) types of documents;
• It manifests as plain text files, unencumbered by licenses or restrictions;
• It is platform-independent, thus relatively immune to changes in technology;
• Its predecessor, SGML, has been in use since 1986, so there is extensive experience and software available.