XML - Are parsing APIs too complex?

I just analyzed my design work for the past day.

It turns out that I implemented simple two level hierarchy in strings, rather than XML, which is strange for my liking.

I had to implement this: A, where A has children a₁, a₂, ..., a^_n, B, where B has children b₁, b₂, ..., b_m, C, where ... and so on. Had to save the definition somewhere.

What was the first implementation like?

"A:a1:a2:a3|B:b1:b2:b3:b4:b5|C:c1:c2:c3:c4:c5:c6", where first-level node was always array[0] if I just parsed the string with is-everywhere split() method, passing "|" as the second parameter.

This is how it went:

var firstLevel = split(array, "|");
var secondLevel = split(firstLevel, ":");
var item = secondLevel(j);

Why?

My <insert worship preference>, it is still easier to parse strings than XML in JavaScript.