Comment by python-b5

I've been working on an XML parser of my own recently and, to be honest, as long as you're fine with a non-validating parser (which are still compliant), it's really not that bad. You have to parse DTDs, but you don't need to actually _do_ anything with them. Namespaces are annoying but they're not in the main spec. CDATA sections aren't all that useful, but they're easy to parse. As far as I'm aware, parsers don't actually need to handle xml:lang/xml:space/etc themselves - they're for use by applications using the parser. Really the only thing that's been particularly frustrating for me is entity expansion.

If you want to support the wider XML ecosystem, with all the complex auxiliary standards, then yes, it's a lot of work, but the language itself isn't that awful to parse. It's a little messy, but I appreciate it at least being well-specified, which JSON is absolutely not.