"Wouldn't it be nice to have easily readable, understandable data and configuration files" No, not really How many times do people actually read XML data, or

"Wouldn't it be nice to have easily readable, understandable data and configuration files" No, not really How many times do people actually read XML data, or configuration files? Once in a while I suppose, when performing some configuration tasks, or debugging some data operation. But 99% of the time, your programs are the ones reading the XML. And this is exactly what XML is designed for - being easy for machines to read. XML is easy to parse, because you have hundreds of available XMl parsers. In many languages you don't even need XML parsers, they're included in the language (actionscript and scala come to mind). It's easy to query with xpath, it's easy to validate with xsd. Most databases can store it natively. There's a whole ecosystem of xml tools that help you work with the data. It would be hard to trade all that for something slightly more readable.