Alternatives to XML

Though not as much as the Jeff Atwood I don't like overuse of XML as well. In our last project we used XML in a bunch of places where it made sense and also planned to use it in bunch of other places where it didn't. For some strange reason some folks think its actually readable and suggested we use XML to dump the user actions we recorded because it's easy to parse and is human readable/editable. While I'm perfectly fine doing it in XML, but definitely not for that reason.

Anyways, sense prevailed and even though we do store it in XML we dump out automation source code in obviously more readable C#/VB.NET.

Before I completely get sidetracked let me state that this post is not about XML or about JSON but about the fact  that there exists many alternatives to both. Head on to here (via Coding Horror)...