XML is just a canonical form and proper subset of SGML always requiring quotes around attribute values, all start- and end-element tags explicitly specified, no short reference (Wiki syntaxes), nor other constructs which can be (unambigiously) omitted in SGML as directed by a DTD grammar. As such, XML is a machine format rather than a format intended for editing by humans, and it's odd to complain about XML being unfriendly to edit when that's what SGML is for.
