threerings/flump — comment on commit 9dc5ece24f0cc7840c6de065d3ee1a4365ee7e85
File:  line 0
By aduros:

Raw XFL being huge is part of it, needing to parse megabytes of hairy XML at game startup should be avoided if we can. Also, having a simplified format makes it a lot easier to write parsers. All the complexity needed to get usable data out of XFL is handled once by the exporter instead of being offloaded to implementers.