I think "bloated" is a reasonable description when a feature that almost no one uses (or even knows the existence of) can DoS an XML parser in 15 lines of code.

I think "bloated" is a reasonable description when a feature that almost no one uses (or even knows the existence of) can DoS an XML parser in 15 lines of code. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs And it especially is bloated if you throw in the whole suite of XML-related technologies, such as Schema (you may think that's unfair, but XML advocates frequently point to such technologies as the solution to various deficiencies of pure XML).