[pohl]

I'm not going claim that it's fundamentally flawed, but here's an anecdote. Many years ago, when XML was having its day in the sun, long before it was sidelined by the simplicity of REST and JSON, I was at a Java One convention listening to a speaker present on some new XML parsing API. After the talk, I approached the presenter for some post-talk Q&A to ask how one might use the API to parse the Jabber protocol, which may or may not be relevant to what XMPP is today (I haven't been keeping up.)

The presenter was unfamiliar with the protocol, so I had to describe how the xml document was opened when you establish a connection, and how elements keep getting appended to it, and how the "xml document" isn't really completed until you're all done and the connection is terminated.

They looked at me like I had two heads.

To them, XML didn't make any sense at all unless you have the entire document available all at once. After all, how on earth could one ever apply an XSLT transform to it, right!?

Good times.

[zmix]

> After all, how on earth could one ever apply an XSLT transform to it, right!?

There is streaming APIs for XML. Just as XSLT 3.0 can do streaming. Saxon has implemented it, for example[1]. I am aware, that you are talking about the past, but also the XML world moves forward, albeit slowly, since the community has gotten much smaller.

[1]: https://www.saxonica.com/html/documentation10/sourcedocs/str...

[dwaite]

It was common to have to parse below XML (angle bracket counting) to convert each stanza to an XML element, then parse those as separate XML documents.

You'd also have to explicitly turn XML namespace support _off_, since so many systems didn't actually support them. XML defines well-formedness and namespace-well-formedness as two different things, and you didn't want to completely drop communication because the other side was sending a message that didn't meet the more stringent requirement.

Some implementations would figure out ways to incrementally disrupt and extract elements from the DOM - but this would sometimes cause resource leaks due to the design of the W3C DOM itself.

The expat had explicit support for parsing Jabber/XMPP messages very early, and was by far the most often XML component used for making libraries.

[pkulak]

That's what Jabber is? Streaming XML? Whoa boy...