I'll quibble and say that data formatted in XML isn't really
self-documenting. At best, the tags of XML provide structure and mnemonics
that facilitate remembering or connoting what the data represents.
If you used really long, full-sentence grammar, studly-capped names in the
tags, I suppose you could call it self-documenting. Annotations are
probably better, though.
> First, to the extent that the data is
> self-documenting and doesn't require callouts to schemas, format
> converters and so on, you remove failure points.
