Thanks. I get your point about the close element including the tag name - but that's the kind of detail I leave to the serialisation library, in the same way th

Thanks. I get your point about the close element including the tag name - but that's the kind of detail I leave to the serialisation library, in the same way that the close scope token in json is different to the start scope token. As for "looks horrible"... well yeah, I always feel that xml looks "spikey" somehow. But I've been programming in curly-brace languages for 30+ years and I still find json harder to read than xml: I think my brain tries to interpret it as code, not data. I find xml easier to read (even when its unformatted) precisely because the close-tokens kind of document what element they're closing. Each to their own I guess. At least we're not stuck using ASN1.