>Now I need to find out which type of JSON an application uses (does it always use UTF8 or does it break the standard? Utf-8 isn't standard to XML, it's requir

>Now I need to find out which type of JSON an application uses (does it always use UTF8 or does it break the standard? Utf-8 isn't standard to XML, it's required by XMPP. So in this scenario the same could be required from json. >Which version of the JSON Schema does it use? No one uses those and everyone is happy. As for XML schemas, xmpp makes even harder to use than it makes everything else. Because it has this endless xml document that you end up having to parse with a streaming parser and those understandably don't support schemas. You end up having to build the little DOMs yourself, for every stanza. This isn't me theorizing, this is what clients (dino, gajim, tkabber) do. Now with the homebrew DOM you're unable to use xpath (unless again you implement it yourself which is no easy feat) which makes xml's awkwardness i.e. the fact that xml doesn't map into common language structures like dicts and lists so, so much worse. > How should I deal with duplicate keys? Generally you don't because libraries don't even support that, and people generally are decent enough to never use those. >All serialization formats are stupid and messy in some way but I think XML gets a bad rep because of the defaults many parsing libraries picked (and the vulnerabilities they introduced). And because it is messy. Not pushing for json in particular but even json doesn't have dtds, entities and so on and so forth. Thus parsing libraries don't implement such features, thus fewer vulnerabilities. Whereas vulns in xml parsers are basically the norm - look at python's out of the box xml parsers - there are four of them and each one has at least some vuln marked in the table in official python docs! Again, I'm no json fan, but it's already light years better than xml. "Any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML." Look at bittorrent's ad-hoc format, bencode. Even that is much better than xml. And in a high level language an entire parser would take you one evening to write with no prior knowledge of the format. And that implementation would be probably about the size of those ad-hoc DOM implementations in xmpp clients, that don't even do any parsing themselves, and would be much more pleasant to use.