You mean like canonical s-expressions (http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt)? One can write a parser for the

You mean like canonical s-expressions (http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt)? One can write a parser for the canonical representation in less than an hour, and a parser for the advanced representation in a weekend. They are infinitely nicer than XML.