[antiframe]

If that's good enough to be human readable than patch is even better.

People do write patch files be hand.

[wnoise]

More commonly, edit them.

[Cpoll]

If the only thing we're concerned about is human readability, we can do better than patch files with their pesky @@ lines and plusses and minuses. But we're talking about a compromise between readability and parseability/schemas.

[antiframe]

Yep and the XML goes too far into unreadability. Also parsing XML is heavier weight.