That really shouldn't be necessary, though! XMPP is conceptually transmitting a series of independent messages, not an arbitrarily complex document tree. There'

That really shouldn't be necessary, though! XMPP is conceptually transmitting a series of independent messages, not an arbitrarily complex document tree. There's no reason why it couldn't have recognized this at the protocol level and transmitted each message independently. (This could have been as simple as placing a CR/LF delimiter between each message and forbidding that sequence within messages.)