I upvoted your comment for the info, but I have no idea why this is an advantage for anyone except the handful of people who create an implementation. Hand-rol

I upvoted your comment for the info, but I have no idea why this is an advantage for anyone except the handful of people who create an implementation. Hand-rolling an XML parser is a pretty sure sign of a certain kind of incompetence. Wouldn't the same be true of hand-rolling a JSON parser, unless you're one of the (rare) first guys to solve the problem for your language or language platform? To put it another way, wouldn't this only have been an advantage before XML libraries became commonplace? The last time I reached for an XML library and found there was none already installed with my platform, I was using Tcl (and it wasn't hard to find TclXML.)