title: XML vs comma delimited text files
body: <p>Ok, I've read a couple books on XML and wrote programs to spit it out and what not.  But here's the question.  Both a comma delimited file and a XML file are "human readable."  But in general, the comma delimited file is much easier on my eyes than a XML file; the tags typically take up as much if not more space than the data.  This just seems to obscure what I'm reading and the format can take a page to contain the same information that you can contain on a single line of text in a comma delimited file.  And a comma delimited file is significantly less complex to parse.  So the real question is why XML?  Just because all the cool kids are doing it?</p>