There's been an
interesting debate on the "Zope" 3 development list about ZCML - the new Zope 3 configuration language.
The debate ultimately seems to be over what I view as "human readable" XML versus "machine friendly" XML. There is a lot of power and usefulness in XML, but the proliferation of namespaces and unknown attribute handling has taken the human out of it, I think. Intent gets lost.
Anyways, they're sticking with the current ZCML format, which can be seen in practice
here. It's not horrible, but it could be better.
Personally, I found the Servlet Web-App Descriptor to be much easier to work with, as per the Jakarta/Tomcat
sample starter file. It's more verbose, which requires more typing (it seems that programmers really hate to type), but the intent is much clearer. Intent. It's valuable. But sadly, so easy to cast off.