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 Protobuf Schema is
A proto3 message definition with numbered fields.
gRPC services and anything using Protocol Buffers.
What changes when you convert XML to Protobuf Schema
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.
Field numbers are assigned in column order starting at one. Types are inferred from the values.
What carries over from XML to Protobuf Schema
Protocol Buffers can express everything XML holds about a table, so this conversion is about shape rather than loss.
Protocol Buffers wants a type for each column, and XML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.