I spent a very interesting evening with the @monzo staff presenting on having a nice work environment in a number of ways. Lots of useful ideas to take into your own workspace.
Okay, unless I crack 6mi/kWh I will shut up after this one. But I drove to/from lunch today, up and down hills between home and uppermill. And this was my final grade...
"actually, the industry uses a plethora of standards, of which XML is only one. However as a whole, the world is moving away from XML due to various unpleasantnesses. Don't you want to be building future-proof systems?"
And *whatever* you end up using, for goodness sake ensure you have competent, pervasive, well-written diagnostics which point *exactly* at where something bad came from.
If you expect a human to interact with the content in any way, please use something less awful such as YAML, or a DSL for your particular use-case. In general, YAML.