If you use unprintable characters in your file, it's no longer human-editable as text. It may as well be XML (i.e. technically text-based but not practically human-readable).
> It may as well be XML (i.e. technically text-based but not practically human-readable).
Is this really a standard complaint about XML? I thought the main complaint was that it wasn't human-writeable. I wouldn't want to read novels in XML, but I've never had a problem opening up an XML file in a text editor to get at bits of it.
Well, you'll often get XML files with a single line and no whitespace between elements, and that makes things a lot more interesting. Basically, you can't rely it being practical to quickly poke around in the text of an XML file. I always feel sad when I have to read the text of an XML file to get information.
> Well, you'll often get XML files with a single line and no whitespace between elements, and that makes things a lot more interesting.
That can be fixed with `xmllint --format`; but I agree that, once you need to bring in external tools, it's not clear that calling it 'human-readable' is really appropriate any more.