I work in the UK energy sector and have been exposed to more than my fair share of bad, crufty APIs. I don't know the reason, but those returning XML are, pract

I work in the UK energy sector and have been exposed to more than my fair share of bad, crufty APIs. I don't know the reason, but those returning XML are, practically speaking, much worse. I've seen a bunch of times where an API returns invalid XML that has to be manipulated before parsing but never that for JSON. I think that's the real sell for JSON. A lot of APIs are terrible, and JSON being simpler, terrible JSON beats terrible XML.