I think one predictor of readability is the ratio of markup to data. XML gives you some flexibility there, but XML-based formats tend to have very verbose marku

I think one predictor of readability is the ratio of markup to data. XML gives you some flexibility there, but XML-based formats tend to have very verbose markup, which overwhelms the data. To cut back on markup in XSV, I used self-closing tags for commas and newlines. It would have been more conventional to use something like <row><column>...</column></row>. That has some advantages, maybe, but it doubles the number of tags (and it introduces things that are not strictly 1:1 with CSV, which could lead to ambiguity).