JSON won the general-purpose data-format argument years ago, and for new APIs it's rarely a contest anymore. But XML hasn't gone anywhere — it's quietly load-bearing in a handful of specific places that aren't going to switch formats any time soon, which is why a converter for it still gets real, steady traffic.
SOAP is still running in production, everywhere
SOAP web services are XML by definition — the protocol itself is built on an XML envelope. Plenty of enterprise systems (banking, insurance, government, healthcare, anything built or integrated in the 2000s–2010s) still run SOAP endpoints that nobody has the budget or appetite to migrate off. If you're integrating with one of these, you're working with XML whether you'd prefer to or not.
RSS and Atom feeds
Podcast feeds, news syndication, blog subscriptions — RSS is XML, and it's had a genuine resurgence as people look for alternatives to algorithm-driven feeds. Parsing or generating a podcast feed means working directly with XML's element/attribute structure, not a JSON equivalent.
Office document formats
.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files are ZIP archives full of XML documents under the hood (the "Office Open XML" format). Anything that generates or parses Office documents programmatically — a report generator, a data-export feature — is working with XML at some layer, even if the end user never sees it.
Configuration in specific ecosystems
Android's layout and manifest files, Java's Maven pom.xml, .NET's .csproj and web.config, Ant build scripts — several major platforms standardized on XML for configuration long before JSON was common, and changing that now would break an enormous amount of existing tooling. If you work in one of these ecosystems, XML config files are just a fact of the job.
Legacy enterprise data interchange
EDI-adjacent systems, older healthcare data standards (HL7 v3, parts of the broader healthcare interoperability landscape), and B2B integrations between large, slow-moving organizations often standardized on XML decades ago. These interfaces tend to be expensive and risky to change, so they persist for a very long time after JSON became the default choice for anything new.
The practical upshot
XML isn't "coming back" — it never left the systems that already depended on it. If your own new projects are JSON-first, that's still the right default. But the moment you touch a SOAP integration, an RSS feed, an Office document, or a Java/Android/.NET config file, you need a fast way to see that XML as structured data you can actually read — which is exactly what our XML to JSON converter is for, entirely in your browser.