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What exactly is nontrivial in parsing XML? Any popular computer language has plenty of libraries for working with XML.

When I'm building firmware for an ATMega or a Cortex-M0 or Tensilica device, the idea of dedicating the required space in my firmware for an XML parser, burning the CPU overhead for doing the parsing, losing the network overhead for the verbose text encoding... all this is absolutely absurd. Just so I can use XMPP? Why? That's my battery life getting wasted, that's my features getting displaced.

There's no place for XML in iot, and definitely no place for XMPP. Even json is luxury you often can't afford, not if you want to make a reasonable cost target or battery life.

The cases you describe do not require really hard xml parsing. It's trivial. Composing and sending an xmpp stanza is extremely easy. Parsing is easy too.

Why you might want it? Well, maybe for the same reason any home router has a built in web interface (despite all the overheads of having a kinda webserver on such device) - for user's convenience and interoperability.

And yes, stating that JSON is somehow better than XML for such cases is just... wrong.

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