Of course you can serialize a struct to XML in an idiomatic way but a lot of the time you don't. You get an XML document produced by someone else that maps to a

Of course you can serialize a struct to XML in an idiomatic way but a lot of the time you don't. You get an XML document produced by someone else that maps to a horribly non-idiomatic representation as an object in your language runtime. I have personally seen lists/arrays serialized to XML in a bewildering variety of ways. The advantage of JSON I think is that the mapping to data structures is relatively straightforward and idiomatic so when you are creating a type to represent a JSON document you are receiving from some external source, you are likely to get something that looks reasonable.