I despise XML, not because it was a bad idea, but because of all the bad ways I've seen people use it. For example, I used to work at an ed-tech company that b

I despise XML, not because it was a bad idea, but because of all the bad ways I've seen people use it. For example, I used to work at an ed-tech company that bought bubble test questions from Pearson, who provided their data in HUGE XML documents. If I remember correctly, they would do things like splitting the sentences of the test questions up so half the question was a tag attribute and the other half was an element. So, instead of just parsing questions, we'd have to parse them and then stitch them back together to make complete sentences. They did that with the answers too, I believe. So weird. The JSON format makes it harder to abuse data like my example above and it is a lot easier to parse, so I'd reach for it before XML any day.