Carrot is not the first XSLT-inspired project to provide a shorter syntax than XSLT itself. Syntax shorthands have included Paul Tchistopolskii's XSLScript, Sam Wilmott's RXSLT, and another project called XSLTXT. Although none of these projects provided direct inspiration for Carrot, they all address one of the same desires that Carrot addresses: being able to program in XSLT more concisely
SLiP is a quick, alternative syntax for creating and editing XML data by hand and if you know Python, it should also be familiar. not my cup of tea but has a nice comparison of other lightweight xml notations
J. Demey, M. Jarrar, and R. Meersman. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Rule Markup Languages for Business Rules on the Semantic Web, (RuleML 2002), volume 60 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, page 107-128. (June 2002)
D. Chamberlin, J. Robie, and D. Florescu. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, (December 2000)Also available at
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/quilt_lncs.pdf. See also
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/quilt.html..