How did they patent this..

I bring you yet another fine example of the US Patent office.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=Serialization&s2=XML&OS=Serialization+AND+XML&RS=Serialization+AND+XML