I'd be happy to know your reasons why.

Overall, XML is too verbose; in particular, the text markup features of XML are needless complexity.

It's not. It's barely more verbose than JSON and a hell of a lot more readable. JSON is appropriate for machines to talk with. XML is appropriate for writing documentation or API specs.

Thanks for the insight. Some of the comments revealed why xml was picked. I personally agree that depending on the problem you must pick the right tools and what might be a good suit in a context it might not be the best fit in another. Moreover, there are probably more mature and performant parsing libs in c for xml than for json.

However, XML might be overkill as it might be too complex for this particular scenario. XML parsing it's complicated and from time to time there are bugs in those parsers. A simpler format might also get the job done and might be safer. However XML might provide flexibility to scale.

Finally, this is what Torvalds said about XML when someone suggested to use it in git:

> XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horrible crap to exist.