[TRiG_Ireland]

I think I'm with the author on this. The two scenarios are very different. Bold text is probably a span of text within a larger block of text: delimiting it with an opening and closing tag makes sense. A config value is a boolean switch.

This makes sense:

    <element>Some text here. <bold>Some more text here.</bold> And yet further text here.</element>

This does not:

    <value>true</value>

That should be:

    value: true

[stvltvs]

A better XML encoding would be the following, optimally with a schema that would define allowed values.

    <setting name="foo" value="true"/>

[TRiG_Ireland]

That still feels ugly and verbose to me.

[stvltvs]

I don't disagree, but it's easier to rigorously validate than lighter-weight markup languages, if that's important to the use case.