You reminded me of a developer complaining about the XML bloat in our product. He said "Do you know how much overhead XML adds to your page loads?". I responde

You reminded me of a developer complaining about the XML bloat in our product. He said "Do you know how much overhead XML adds to your page loads?". I responded "Yes, roughly 60ms on uncached page loads.". Later he proudly explained that he didn't know how to write html tables because he only uses CSS.