I haven't seen any other format aside from INI get universal either before businessmen and retards started to circle-jerk to their newly-found enterprise bussiness solution XML.
csv?
but yes. They're all "XML XML XML". it's just a fucking format. It's not that big of a deal.
malformed content like mismatched parenthesis can fuck up the parser
it's not really hard to see where it failed, methinks. Just autoindent, and identation should give you the clue about where everything started.