[jerf]

Actually, the problem is XML demonstrates the limits of the "UNIX philosophy". Plain text simply isn't the be-all, end-all of formats. You can't easily use cut, awk, or grep on JSON, either. The "UNIX philosophy" does poorly with trees and graphs (in the computer science sense).

That's not a bad thing. The UNIX philosophy encourages you to avoid those things if you don't need them. It's very powerful. But when you actually, factually need them, you're not going to get very far with UNIX tools. That's OK; it is neither an indictment of UNIX nor of the data. Different tools are called for.