[Perseids]

I would even argue that XML is not even that human-readable. Take a look at this pom: https://maven.apache.org/pom.html#The_Super_POM . Even with syntax highlighting it is extremely difficult to parse visually. Compare that to nginx's custom config file format: http://wiki.nginx.org/FullExample .

[ollysb]

If you take the brackets and the closing tags out (use meaningful space) it's a hell of an improvement[1], . A format I really like (ok it's aimed at html not xml) is the slim templating language[2]. It manages to pack the same information in but is massively more readable.

[1] https://gist.github.com/opsb/9424457

[2] http://slim-lang.com/

[stingraycharles]

Yeah this is exactly where my hate towards Maven configuration comes from, but it's more a testimonial of a bad fit for configuration files than critique towards XML. Java enterprise application configuration has the tendency to be very "expert-friendly", and this is where XML got its bad name from.