Agreed, but in this case the readability of the text format is only a minor benefit.

I didn't want to go on a tangent, but the problem is that vanilla Windows XP (not sure about Vista) does not make it safe to play with plain text files, especially those meant for a Linux system. Notepad is not safe. So to protect the unaware, we need another layer between the user and the raw data to make . Any format would be fine, as long as there's a free tool available that the customer and their paranoid IT support would both be comfortable with, which preferably might already be installed, and Windows knows not to open it with Notepad by default. Since other products on the same network already use XML, the customer is OK with staring at this format, expects that .xml files will pop up read-only in Internet Explorer, and knows that the angled brackets mean serious business.

If any other format met all these needs at once, I'd jump for it -- but I haven't seen anything else that does. Any suggestions for other formats that work well on both Windows and Unix?