The trouble is the XML formatter in eclipse has very little customizability (spaces vs tabs, gutter are the only ones I've found that are useful) (and none on a per-project level) and certainly can't be told NOT to put all elements on a new line. So if we use it, it ends up looking so nasty that we should just invest the time to make it look ok.

There are some better XML editors out there for sure which *can* apply ok formatting (but never found a great one as Dan says).

So, here's a challenge for readers: find a formatting template that will take a file which has been (lovingly) hand formatted, like https://svn.jboss.org/repos/weld/doc/trunk/reference/en-US/ri-spi.xml and not screw it all up (there might be a couple of errors in there) :-)