XML has string attributes and text content. Sure, you can add information until you arrive at a point where a string attribute or text content will be interpre

XML has string attributes and text content. Sure, you can add information until you arrive at a point where a string attribute or text content will be interpreted as a certain data type, but XML itself doesn't have it. > JSON also has similar higher-level abstraction layers with more metadata. JSON has all the basic data types built right in, there's no need for more metadata to do simple things. There's a reasonable mapping to basic data types and structures for almost any language. > The problem is that nobody can agree on which one to use, or even whether to use one at all, and most code that's deserializing JSON in the wild is not going to be able to distinguish metadata from data. ...which is generally fine because of the aforementioned mapping. Your JSON library doesn't have to (and shouldn't) do any magic.