Quote Originally Posted by Paulius
I disagree completely with storing meshes in xml. Compressed ASCII will still likely be larger than a binary file, if the mesh is big you?¢_Tll have horrible parsing time and who?¢_Td be crazy enough to modify them by hand, let alone figure out what?¢_Ts where?
You are right, binary is better and faster for loading (you can just block read vertex data etc into the arrays directly), and writting / modifying a large model by hand would be a nightmare.

I keep to xml for my stuff because the model format doesn't just contain the model definition, but the physics collision and body information which I need to change manaully to get thing working. No other formats supported the stuff I needed and xml makes it easy for me to change the structure if I need to.

That said I'll probably eat my own words here in a few months and convert the xml to a binary format anyway