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That doesn't match my memory, though its been a while now!

I remember the arguments largely revolving around verbosity and the prevalence of JSON use in browsers.

That doesn't mean bandwidth wasn't a consideration, but I mostly remember hearing devs complain about how verbose or difficult to work with XML was.

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Your memory is correct. Once compression was applied, the size on the wire was mostly a wash. Parsing costs were often greater but that's at the endpoints.

But one of those endpoints is a client on a mobile phone, which when we started with Internet on mobile devices wasn't a particularly powerful CPU architecture.

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