JSON. It makes for a significantly smaller payload (especially important in that in most cases, you're transmitting a great number of smaller chunks) and I don

JSON. It makes for a significantly smaller payload (especially important in that in most cases, you're transmitting a great number of smaller chunks) and I don't buy the readability argument — especially when it's almost a no-brainer to employ a function to display to "pretty" indent JSON represenstation — print_r in PHP, pp in ruby, etc.…) I believe just about every language used in web development includes a library for shuffling JSON in and out of native data structures.