Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's really not that bad, especially with indentation and color coding. You're kind of cheating by putting it into HN, which is terrible for code. > XML is painful for humans to read and write. Speaking of claims no-one made; no-one's talking about writing patch files by hand.
If that's good enough to be human readable than patch is even better. People do write patch files be hand.
If the only thing we're concerned about is human readability, we can do better than patch files with their pesky @@ lines and plusses and minuses. But we're talking about a compromise between readability and parseability/schemas.