> a well-defined subset of XML No. You need to define what configuration files are valid or not, but a subset of XML on the basis of syntactic and structural a

> a well-defined subset of XML No. You need to define what configuration files are valid or not, but a subset of XML on the basis of syntactic and structural alternatives is lame and nonstandard. Get a library that parses actual XML, allow anything reasonable as input (for example, no external entities, DTDs, PSVI etc. to keep the file self contained) and "flatten" CDATA sections, entities, namespace prefixes, idrefs etc.