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The "redundant" noise makes it more human-readable in my opinion. If you're in the weeds of a big XML document that's larger than your viewport, being able to see that you're at the end of a </Address> helps you keep your place, as opposed to something like JSON which I find much easier to get lost in. Even if it's not that big I appreciate the extra rails on the XML making it easier to keep my place.

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I consider this a fallacy. The condition you are given is not a common occurence. In the event they do occur, the solution can be found in your editor or viewer. It does not make sense to inject spurious junk into what is designed as a data interchange format, in which includes network information interchange.

There's probably a name for this kind of fallacy that exaggerate the effect of a problem and the resulting contortions that were engineered around it.

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