Gunnar, the apache configuration files for example are a mess, and certainly wouldn’t become harder to edit if they were some real XML.

Similar things apply to other applications. And if you reread my first post, I never suggested to use XML for all configuration files, but just for those who need some nesting structures.

If you don’t need nesting, some other format with proper character encoding information is fine with me. It should just be standardized e.g. with respect to quote handling, whitespace handling etc.

key = value

and

key="value"

are already sufficiently different that most applications can only read one or the other.

P.S. I couldn’t reach your blog the last few days; today it worked after a long time and with some error message on top: “not well-formed (invalid token)” seems like you’re having some problems with the XML for your blog? :-)