XML is more complex than it needs to be, but this article is just ridiculous. XMPP isn't complicated because it uses XML, it's complicated because it's a modern

XML is more complex than it needs to be, but this article is just ridiculous. XMPP isn't complicated because it uses XML, it's complicated because it's a modern IM protocol. If anything, using XML makes implementing an XMPP library significantly easier than if it had its own wire format. A better comparison than RSS v. XMPP is RSS v. Atom. And in this comparison, RSS is by far the loser. It's incredibly difficult to write an RSS parser which can handle even a small fraction of the RSS published today, mostly because the standard is absolute garbage. In contrast, an Atom parser can be knocked out in an afternoon. I'd be happy with a "reduced set" of XML, which excludes stuff like DTDs, named entities, and references. I've never seen these features put to any significant use in real life. But most of XML is quite sane (if a bit verbose).