basic qs - how is xml more flexible for exchanging data?

[Anil Philip <goodnewsforyou@yahoo.com>]

Hello,
I would agree that XML is human readable and that
XML+HTML is probably better than HTML. However, I was
wondering:
When we used C, (I guess there's an entire generation
that didnt need to learn it :)), one transferred data
using structs.
eg.
/* from memory... */
struct Foo {
int i;
char[] str;
long j;
};

The Sender and Receiver were tied into explicitly
knowing about Foo's structure - and so were considered
tightly coupled, a bad thing.

With XML, one is sending the description together with
the data in a tagged text file. However, in most cases
of data transfer, the code of both Sender and Receiver
still has to know the structure of Foo especially when
parsing the data file. So how is it more flexible or
even better? (apart from endian stuff)
thanks,
Anil Philip
-

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