Yeah, that's awful XML. Ironically, they used to have a decent readable format in NeXTStep, it was only later it was XML-ified.

How old is this format?

I had the impression mobile was some new try at frontend tech, but somehow iOS and Android threw a whole bunch of outdated stuff at me.

I mean, before the iPhone I designed a XML based ETL config system and tried to avoid all the common XML errors, then I start doing a mobile app 10 years later and it's like all that knowledge was forgotten...

I remember when Neverwinter Nights 2 came out touting that all of its data files were in XML for ease of modifying in user extensions. So I had a look and was it XML? Was it fuck, it was like a GeoCities novice's idea of how to code HTML - absolutely unparseable in any way unless you're the idiot who decided what the codebase needed was another shitty homegrown parser.

And yes, plists suck and make your XPath selectors ugly, although you could write a function to abstract them out.

> but its totally not processable by xslt.

It's a bit inconvenient but perfectly processable with XPath:

    /dict/key[.='CFBundleDisplayName']/following-sibling::string[1]