There's an anti-buzzword backlash against XML floating around, which is a natural reaction to something that's been hyped so much by marketers.

But after all the smoke clears, it's pretty hard to beat the simplicity of using XML::Simple's XMLin() and XMLout() functions.

CSV files combined with while (<IN>) {...} logic has old-school appeal, but in the end, it's irritating and tedious. There's so many exceptions to be handled, like data that splits over lines, or data that contains the delimiter as part of the data, etc, and it's not as flexible as XML when you have to add new variables.