The main complain about XML (in the config file context) seems to be the difficulty of editing it "by hand". If think about it, thats not a problem of the form

The main complain about XML (in the config file context) seems to be the difficulty of editing it "by hand". If think about it, thats not a problem of the format but of the editors people typically use. Simple text editors used in a command line use a line paradigm rather than a tree paradigm. Thats not well suited and its not the fault of the format. Given that trees is about as fundamemtal as it gets as a data structure maybe what is really needed to end these format wars is not a new format but a new editor or editor plugin.