Why ConLL is not in XML format I am new to NLP, I found a format named ConLL which seems a tab-separated file,
like 

ID FORM LEMMA PLEMMA POS PPOS FEAT PFEAT HEAD PHEAD DEPREL PDEPREL 


I found a dependency Treebank in this format for Persian. I would like to do some experiment on it. I am familiar with C# and C# has great libraries for XML document files. 

I just wonder why such a corpus is not in XML format! I don't say a sophisticated one but they could put each line in a node of XML. Then at least, I would know what is the tag for each element.

However, I can convert it to XML.
One reason for sure is, that you can easialy open it in spreadsheet viewer.