> Though I think the biggest benefit of JSON is that it is so simple, at least compared to XML. It makes it harder to just dump your internal data structures as

> Though I think the biggest benefit of JSON is that it is so simple, at least compared to XML. It makes it harder to just dump your internal data structures as is. Which forced people to actually serialize their data. Though with time people have overcomplicated it with objects that have "type" and "value" fields, basically designing their own standard. XML is a document language with features like mixed content to represent concepts like subsections of formatted text. IMHO quite a few of XML's failings were in the "data format" crowd being a separate camp, and the two never really pushing for good middle ground. For the crowd that wanted a common scaffolding for document formats, having the rules between say namespace usage in XHTML vs Docbook-XML would not be a problem. For instance, HTML states you should ignore unrecognized tags and instead just show the text contents. That all came back to bite hard when the data model people started to try to do canonicalization and document signing. A "strict" variant of JSON fits on a napkin - basically, reject documents with multiple identical keys in an object, represent native numbers using IEEE double-precision floating point, reject documents which do not meet the grammar.