You're complaining that standard parsers give you extra information about the document being parsed? Another thing that might annoy you: even though comments are "ignored", many XML parsers generate comment nodes in the DOM. This allows you to produce an output document that is exactly equivalent to the input document.

If a node doesn't mean anything to your application, ignore it. If you're an XHTML parser, the whitespace is significant, so you need to handle it. If you're a FooML parser, the whitespace is insignificant, so just ignore it.

If you hate XML, this is not a particularly good justification.