XML design for CodeIgniter Scaffolding (brainstorming)

[eluser]xwero[/eluser]
I think tags are good to structure documents but for metadata it's a bridge too far. I think YAML, JSON or even plain php arrays are better suited because of two things.

XML was build to have a computer and human readable format. But if i see a xml file most of the times i don't see the data because the tag overload. The shown snippet can be used as an example.

Because there are so many tags it makes the file fat.

In the case of php arrays you don't even need a format parser before you can begin to work with the metadata.