I agree that handling XML is more complex than handling JSON, but only slightly. Unless you use Java of course, where for some reason, handling XML is always pa

I agree that handling XML is more complex than handling JSON, but only slightly. Unless you use Java of course, where for some reason, handling XML is always pain in the ass. The complexity of XML features (namespaces and bunch of other standards) is hidden in libraries. And some of those features might be useful, only to be re-implemented in JSON, with same amount of additional complexity in libraries. Just recently I used lxml in Python to parse RSS and it gave me collection like if I used json module. Moreover, I used XPath extensively to pick parts of the XML I was interested in. This would have been more complex with manual traversal. Of course there are Python bindings to jq, but in general the jq language isn't as widespread as XPath. Then there's the slight annoyance of accessing attributes via dedicated getter methods as they're "special" as you mention. But in all, I haven't noticed millions of lines of extra code and complexity.