Nah, they've been at that since at least 2005, when I worked there, and I'm pretty sure it was in their guidelines for years at that point. My guess is that they still have that in their guidelines.

For the most part, when doing a procurement, you'd just check a box that the software supported XML in some form (and many vendors added some stupid XML feature, even if their software didn't have a need for it at all), and it would satisfy that requirement.