I have to admit that I'm an XML-newbie. I personally want to move to XML, because the ECD format already looks kinda-sorta like XML. Ideally, the ECD format would disappear, and there would be an XECD format that would have a nice DTD and would contain all the same information the normal ECD format does right now..... and all our parsing troubles would go away.

The decision is not really up to me, though -- I'm just a grunt. ;-)