There is a growing trend in IT of managers and directors demanding the inclusion of certain technologies in projects just to seem 'cutting-edge', even if they are inappropriate. In particular, what I like to call XMLFAIL is a fast-growing form of idiocy.
Take, for example, the following bright idea from Christopher Green:
We can do this by using what web services use, XML serialization. Its a fast way of getting our data from the proxy class back to XML. Then deserialize the XML back to the entity class.
This within a system, which is pretty mad given how complex and slow XML parsing is, not to mention the relative bloat of an XML stream compared to many other data layouts. The propagation of .NET across what was once a fairly sane industry makes people so dumb.
Please, people, repeat after me: XML is not the answer to everything.
