You can at least get the structure out of that from the textual representation. How well do your eyeballs do looking at a hex dump of protobufs or ASN.1?
True, any format can be abused, though I'm not sure SVG could really do much better. What I really love is when people tell me that XML is just sexps in drag: I paste a screenful of lisp, delete a random parenthesis in the middle, and challenge them to tell me where the syntax error is without relying on formatting (the compiler sure doesn't).
Mind you I love the hell out of lisp, it just isn't The One True Syntax over all others.
> 03. It's human-readable: no specialized tools are required to look at and understand the data contained within an XML document.
And then there's an example document in which the tag names are "a", "b", "c", and "d".