Much agreement here, and from the exact same usecase. Probably the easiest B2B API integration scenario I worked with in the past was XML + XML Schema validati

Much agreement here, and from the exact same usecase. Probably the easiest B2B API integration scenario I worked with in the past was XML + XML Schema validation. And I still think XML is more readable in many cases than JSON, because while verbose the hierarchical structure is very easy to grasp, sometimes I misread an entire JSON document at first because I missed a quick "[" or "[{" (yes I have also misread XML documents because of the sheer weight of text you are presented with, so I'll call that one a wash). I do agree with the XML criticisms around writability and complexity, though I think if you made a Venn diagram of the actual complexities inherent in managing a multi-client document-exchange system and the complexities of XML+Schema, you'd find that they're similar--and that many people who start building such an exchange with JSON documents end up stumbling into the same amount of complexity except in an ad hoc fashion. It's funny, I wonder if other people have the same surreal experience: as the mass zeitgeist moved away from XML I was more or less like, okay, gotta go with it, as the driftwood goes with the currents. It's interesting how the zeitgeist functions. You can tell it's happening when people look at your functional system and are like, "Uhh, why aren't you using X...?" as though it's self-evident that you should drop everything and rewrite. Where X was, over the years (dating myself) {"Java", "PHP", "Node", "Rails", "Jquery", "REST", "Angular", "React", "Thrift", "NoSQL", "Protobuf", "Hadoop"}. Some of which I quite happily used, BTW, so the interesting part is the penetrative nature of the conversation, e.g. how the quite-functional-but-not-hot technology becomes the sick gazelle falling behind the herd, even as it is not empirically sick.