There is no particular relationship between Windows and XML. And just to play devil's advocate, is the lack of XML support in grep, sed, and awk a problem with the data format or with the tools? Why can't we have new standard tools that operate on hierarchical formats such as XML / JSON / YAML? Current standard Unix tools have plenty of flaws and as forward thinking developers we shouldn't be afraid to replace them with something better.
I have noticed a particular relationship between Windows, Java, and XML: all Java programmers nowadays seem to come from Windows (and then I end up with ^M CR characters in all the text files, even shell scripts!), use Java, and write configuration in XML.
YAML doesn't need any special tools - it's ASCII and can easily be processed with AWK, for example.
I don't know about you, but the last thing I want is to have to have a whole new set of specialized tools, just so somebody could masturbate in XML and JSON.
XML is a markup language. That means it's for documents, possibly for documents with pictures, perhaps even with audio. It's not and never was meant for storing configuration or data inside of it. XML is designed to be used in tandem with XSLT, and XSLT's purpose is to transform the source XML document into (multiple) target(s): ASCII, ISO 9660, audio, image, PDF, HTML, whatever one writes as the transformation rules in the XSLT file. XML was never meant to be used standalone.
If you really want to put the configuration into an XML file, fine, but then write an XSLT stylesheet which generates a plain ASCII .cf or .conf file, so its processing and parsing can be simple afterwards. XML goes against the core UNIX tenet: keep it simple.
Do you like complex things? I do not, and life is too short.
