This is true but in the early days XML framework libraries gained a well deserved reputation for poor performance because they would parse into a DOM first and

This is true but in the early days XML framework libraries gained a well deserved reputation for poor performance because they would parse into a DOM first and then serialize from there. I improved the runtimes of several projects from hours to seconds by switching the serialization from DOM to SAX. The prevalence and focus on the document model for every usage of XML resulted in a reputation hit. One that XML has really struggled to overcome.