I'm going to say something bald here: JSON people often dont know what schema based interchange formats are, and why they are fast. Such as protocol buffers, or

I'm going to say something bald here: JSON people often dont know what schema based interchange formats are, and why they are fast. Such as protocol buffers, or facebook/apache thrift. speed: use thrift or protocol buffers ease of implemention: json xml has best of both worlds. And therefore it is most of the time not suited. However the fact that it can support schema (XMLSchema), document translations (XSLT/XQuery) and query mechanisms (XPATH/XQuery) makes it a format very well suited for big enterprises. Where specification is important. This is why cluncky protocols such as SOAP are built on top of XML. It is future proof (extensibility is more difficult in json). It is schema based (parsing, validation and language binding is easier). JSON for example doesnt support references between nodes. You can built it in, but its not standard. JSON is the easy peasy solution, the quick win, the fast enough one, and therefore the winner. However XML is the big beast that has it all, and therefore its complex. But that doesnt mean it sucks.