You are looking at the HTML representation of the mFormat?> format.
HTML is good for debugging, but probably is not suitable for your application.
Please see "format" parameter documentation at the API help
for more information.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<api>
<query>
<pages>
<page ns="0" title="Main Page" missing="" />
</pages>
<backlinks />
</query>
</api>