> So what about YAML (www.yaml.org)?  I expect that would be a 
> much lighter prereq.  There are Ruby and Perl parsers available.

Well, unfortunately that doesn't help us much right now, does it? ;-) We do
have (a variety of) XML reading and writing tools but no support whatsoever
for YAML (which I kinda like though I'm not convinced it'll succeed in the
long term as serialization format). Care to write one?

Cheers,
  - Andreas