Or rather, was. At the time one could either: - write a sax event based parser that scaled but was low level - use a DOM parser with a fairly convoluted API.

Or rather, was. At the time one could either: - write a sax event based parser that scaled but was low level - use a DOM parser with a fairly convoluted API. The combination of attributes and children makes for wordy accessors. Both YAML and JSON provide formats that more readily deserialize into native map / list / string / number types which at the time was quite convenient.