> You don't have to do things like [...] carve out their own way to represent lists, mappings, and numbers I work with XML extensively and out of hundreds of c

> You don't have to do things like [...] carve out their own way to represent lists, mappings, and numbers I work with XML extensively and out of hundreds of classes and fields, I've needed an arbitrary dictionary maybe a handful of times. Mapping/dictionary is json's abysmal replacement for a class/struct in which case you'd have XML like <MyClass> <Field1>Value</Field1> </MyClass> IOW, _the tag is the key_ ! List? Simply repeated elements. Numbers? What are you talking about, they're directly representable in XML and XSD knows about integers, floats, etc. (unlike json).