Simple XML     I've been thinking that XML can be simplified for simple applications.  However, unlike many proposals out there, I think this is simple.    Just create an editor that hides the less-then and greater then symbols.  Further, the delimiting tag can be hidden also.    How to show containment?  Use positioning, WYSIWYG like Python does, or introduce some simple containment symbol, like C++, Java and other languages.  Another alternative is to use diagramatic editor symbols such as those from Action Diagrams to delineate structure.   For example,         &lt;root>Hello<data<x</data></root>         becomes:          root hello                   data  x Of course, that is not accurate, there has to be more to distinguish stuff.  You get my drift? I'm not the only one thinking about this in this manner, of course.  Recently there is the idea of SDL, see:  http://jakarta.apache.org/hivemind/sdl.html   by Howard Lewis Ship. There are other proposals too, see http://www.xmlsuck.com/pault/pxml/xmlalternatives.html Related to this (in some ways) are the recent or ongoing attempts to create alternative serializations of RDF, especially in XML.  For example, history of RDF formats:  http://www.cip.ifi.lmu.de/~bolzer/tmp/history.html Turtle, see http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2004/01/turtle/ R:, see http://www.dehora.net/journal/2004/07/r.html Trix, see http://www.w3.org/2004/03/trix/     J. Betancourt