Is xml overhyped?



I've had an interest in programming for years and have followed its
trends, but not really took the time to program much. Yes, I read books
and so on, but always got onto other, more prior things in life to do.
Now, this time, I really want to learn it, and learn it well.

This time, and in light of previous experience, I plan to keep things
as simple as can be, as on previous attempts I got too easily sucked
into trivia. I'm limiting myself to scripting languages, such as python
and perl. I'm developing an interest in plaintext file formats and
delimited flatfile 'databases' as they seem quite simple, and can be
effective for my needs. I plan to spend a year or two on plaintext
databases and file formats - comma/tab/pipe delimited. This is all
through 'shell' scripts, sed, awk, perl etc - no GUI, no database
engine, no web, none of that complexity, not for now.

It seems that the whole world is going xml though. Should I get onto
learning xml as soon as I can or just leave it till much, much later? I
understand xml a little, but I find there's too much theoretical
overhead and I would need to understand all the other things that go
with it such xslt and so on.

Would I be spending too much time on antiquated techniques if I spend a
year or two on delimited plaintext and its parsing? or am I doing the
right thing?

.

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