[sumtechguy]

My only quip is both are basically unreadable in most use cases. Most programs worth anything that use these formats usually strip out all the extra spaces and formatting. You usually have to take an extra step to 'reformat' just so you can read it. And anyone who has had an open paren or carrot or missing could show how painful manually parsing a 400+ field one of these is. Trying to say one is better than the other ignores the use cases for both. One being good at slugging data into javascript/python. The other being good at light typing, annotation and transform.

[bayindirh]

I never seen a tool which stores its XML config in a minified/uglified form by removing whitespace. The biggest two tools I play and which use XML are Keycloak and Eclipse, and none of them do this.

All of the parsers I used, and editors I have edited XML always shown the correct place where a caret is missing or XML is broken in anyway, so I have never hunted anything down inside a big XML file.

However, this doesn't invalidate your experience about unreadable XML files, which are most definitely present in the wild.

However, I agree that none of them are good config file formats, but storing data, I'll take XML all day, every day (except when I really need a binary file format, e.g.: for compressing data).