Seems silly to me.
Just use a file. With the meta data in it. Then you're not breaking things like svn.
I can see the benefit from the *programmer's* aspect, obviously. They don't need to worry about file formats, rejiggering things if they insert sections, etc. Just have a separate file for everything you want to keep track of. And more than likely they don't really care if someone can stick an iWork document in a source code repository.
