Absolutely yes, I have fond memories of the Pidgin client, which handled everything gracefully, and also libpurple.

This was ages ago, is pidgin still one of the best xmpp clients, or are there better ones now?

I remember that pidgin even used with facebook, unfortunately facebook dropped xmpp as someone else in this thread mentioned!

But XMPP encoded everything in XML? This seems like a really high overhead.

Fortunately, there's an RFC for people concerned about this :) https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0295.html

Wow, my first thought reading through it was "wait they're just wrapping XML in JSON, what in the world is happening here", eyes widened after reading the completely contradictory introduction, until I saw the reason for that RFC.

Was this published on april 1st?

the internet mostly works with lengthy markup languages, they compress well, no problem