I should think that there would be rather little to gain from either method; however, My purpose in recommending Sleep was to firstly offer Yet Another Answer that the poster may not have been aware of and secondly offer something that is rather robust and can be replaced easily. With Sleep, you could simply rewrite the script and use the existing engine. For me, this would be a rather large positive. XML is Yet Another Embedded Language and key-value pairs are fine, but if the poster wishes to change something, then this has to be reworked. Sleep (or any other language, I simply choose the 'hot new thingie') allows for some abstraction, which I find nice in certain situations.