A key difference now compared to the early days of XML and RSS is there weren't great libraries out there to handle the processing, both output and input. Many

A key difference now compared to the early days of XML and RSS is there weren't great libraries out there to handle the processing, both output and input. Many people were rolling their own. That definitely wasn't great. It was similar to using JavaScript prior to the widespread adoption of JQuery. However, that's not the case anymore. I think there are possibly a lot of benefits to recommend jsonfeed over RSS (or, a better solution, in my opinion, Atom), but you can build yourself a bit of a straw man by ascribing the problems of early XML usage with the situation today.