I'd agree that things like JSON and EDN don't convey all the type information that you might want (things you mention like type bounds, orderedness, number form

I'd agree that things like JSON and EDN don't convey all the type information that you might want (things you mention like type bounds, orderedness, number format). Though at least in a JSON string like {foo: [elementOne elementTwo]} you know that foo is a list of things, which is something that the XML document doesn't encode for you. So perhaps I should make my statement more precise and say that XML data, in the absence of the schema information, is lossy compared to some formats like JSON or EDN. [Edit: to answer the potential question of why I'd be using XML without have schema information, I was being provided the XML by an API that called web APIs and converted the result of the web call into XML (even if it was JSON) before passing it to me.]