XML shorthands

XML has become one of the most well established standards in computer technology. It's being used in almost all kinds of applications. I won't talk about its great features and advantages...much has been said about that.
However, not everyone is fully satisfied with XML, specially with its verbose syntax. This can make the document hard to read and create. I don't usually have to create large XML documents by hand, but if I'd have to, I probably would have the same feeling :)
Some people got tired of this and created alternatives to XML. The objective is not to substitute XML, but to provide a way to write XML documents more easily. So, all of them offer an easy way to convert the document to full XML. You can have a look a some of those XML shorthands in this comparison. As you can see, their syntax is similar and most of the times inspired by Python: nested elements are identified by identation (at least SLiP and SOX). I personally never liked this (seems a very dangerous world). But I have to admit that a few of them really are simpler than XML, and thus can make it less painful to create large documents by hand. Others (PYX and SXML), however, seem a lot harder and confusing than XML itself.
So, are these XML shorthands really helpful ? In my opinion, if you create/edit large XML documents by hand regularly and liked one of those alternative languages, it can be an good solution.