(Properly formatted) XML can be parsed, and streamed, by a visibly-pushdown automaton[1][2].

"Visibly Pushdown Expressions"[3] can simplify parsing with a terse syntax styled after regular expressions, and there's an extension to SQL which can query XML documents using VPAs[4].

JSON can also be parsed and validated with visibly pushdown automata. There's an interesting project[5] which aims to automatically produce a VPA from a JSON-schema to validate documents.

In theory these should be able outperform parsers based on deterministic pushdown automata (ie, (LA)LR parsers), but they're less widely used and understood, as they're much newer than the conventional parsing techniques and absent from the popular literature (Dragon Book, EAC etc).

[1]:https://madhu.cs.illinois.edu/www07.pdf

[2]:https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~alur/Cav14.pdf

[4]:https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~zaniolo/papers/002_R13.pdf

[3]:https://homes.cs.aau.dk/~srba/courses/MCS-07/vpe.pdf

[5]:https://www.gaetanstaquet.com/ValidatingJSONDocumentsWithLea...