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 INI is
INI is the oldest configuration format still in daily use: named sections, then key equals value lines.
Windows software, PHP, Git and a long tail of tools that never moved on.
What changes when you convert XML to INI
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.
Each row becomes a section named after its first column, with one key per remaining column.
What carries over from XML to INI
XML records 3 things about a table that INI has no way to hold.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in INI, so a null and an empty string in the XML both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
XML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. INI has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in INI, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
The identifier 007 comes out of the INI 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 INI file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the INI.