What XML is
XML marks up data with nested named tags and optional attributes. It is verbose, strict about being well-formed, and can carry a schema that says what shape a document must have.
Enterprise integrations, government data feeds, RSS, SOAP services and older document formats.
What AsciiDoc is
AsciiDoc tables are delimited by |=== and take a cols attribute describing the columns.
Antora documentation sites, and technical writing teams that outgrew Markdown.
What changes when you convert XML to AsciiDoc
The first repeating element is treated as the rows. Attributes are read alongside child elements and prefixed so they do not collide with a same-named tag. Nesting one level deep becomes dotted column names; deeper structures are kept as text.
The header option is set so the first row renders as a header row rather than data.
What carries over from XML to AsciiDoc
One property of the XML has no home in AsciiDoc, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in AsciiDoc, so a null and an empty string in the XML both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
AsciiDoc marks header cells differently from data cells, so the keys are lifted out and written once as a marked header row rather than repeated on every row.
The identifier 007 comes out of the AsciiDoc as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a AsciiDoc file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the AsciiDoc.