Calling it. Nginx won because it's configs are not xml. Apache should have learned by now.
Yes, Apache configs are confusing, but it's not due to them being in a HTML-like style, and I suspect same thing would happen even if they had similar syntax Nginx.
IMO the problem is that Apache is extremely modular and every little piece was split into a separate module. There are many modules that are pretty much essential. It doesn't help that the example Apache config then comes with many not essential modules enabled.
One time I was motivated to just have Apache run only things that are necessary. I started without any modules and each time config complained that something is missing, I read documentation about it and either enabled it, or removed from the config. It took me quite a while. And I know people (in fact that is a vast majority) who would never bother to do that. Because of that Nginx looks attractive out of the box, because by default you don't need any modules to have a basic server.
Similarly this is also the reason why people also moved from Sendmail to Postfix. Sendmail doesn't use XML but it also has a steeper learning curve to correctly configure it.
And Apache config predates XML. It was designed to look like HTML, because it's a webserver I guess.
XML with config helpers and the ability to open it in an editor and see what is going on and tweak it is a great experience. XML with the expectation that an editor will be used to configure it is a terrible experience.
The above also applies if you replace "XML" with "JSON". :-)
There's just opening and closing tags for a stanza. Look at a basic virtualhost config.
Ultimately, XML was a colossal mistake carried out to perfection.
SXML is much easier to parse and it's more concise.
[1] http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html#tag-omission-on-document-l...
In XML there's also the concept of using self-closing tags only for "empty tags". Meaning, <tagname val="123"/> isn't "correct" and <tagname>123</tagname> should be used instead; while s-expressions simplify this.
XML is great because there are plenty of fast parsers for it with bindings in pretty every programming. It can be modified with nothing more than a text editor, by someone halfway competent.
XML is bad because it will never be quite as optimal as some binary only solution and editing with a test editor is painful.
Its not like most programming languages would have a hard time with gzipped xml either. This grants most of the benefits of binary formats and is often smaller than all but the most carefully designed ones.
All of that even presumes config load time matters. I a crazy large case maybe 10MB loads from a disk and the important stuff is cached in memory, in the actual structures that will use the data later. It just doesn't matter. Gzipped xml is fast enough for realtime high performance games, who cares about this silly XML hating anymore. Just pick something that works and move on.