During the days of XML being the first JSON, the libraries available for handling XML documents were rather obtuse and pedantic. The view was that two XML entit

During the days of XML being the first JSON, the libraries available for handling XML documents were rather obtuse and pedantic. The view was that two XML entities that just had all the same names and values, but we're defined in different namespaces, were not the same entity. Everyone was pushing for the nost strict interpretation of things, under the idea that "stricter is safer". So you couldn't just read and write a smattering of tags and attributes and expect anything to work. You needed to know what namespace each went in. There were rules about which ones required prefixes and which didn't. You needed very intimate knowledge of the data before you could ever read it, knowledge that may not have been easy to come by, given the documentation efforts were even worse back then than they are now. And then JSON came around and said "screw all that, just overload the scripting engine itself to do parsing directly". Early JSON wasn't a standard, it was just a technique of taking a response body and calling `eval()` on it. It was wildly dangerous and--as most wildly dangerous things--incredibly freeing and intoxicating. These days, the XML story has gotten better. Some newer versions of processing libraries are not as strict about namespacing--they will let you spit out whatever tag soup you want without being so officious. But the damage was done and now XML has a reputation.