> I have rarely seen a web API that uses anything other than straightforward JSON. There are differences between HTML vs. AJAX+JSON+Javascript+DOM. JSON has a

> I have rarely seen a web API that uses anything other than straightforward JSON. There are differences between HTML vs. AJAX+JSON+Javascript+DOM. JSON has a lot less of a schema than HTML. You don't have to execute custom code from a remote server to render plain HTML. Client-side rendering is more complex for the client. A Javascript-based page is typically going to require more requests for remote resources than inline HTML, potentially meaning more bandwidth and caching/archiving costs. I can't quite put my finger on the implications right now, but I wanted to note that "JSON is a standard." doesn't mean much to me, since JSON is not comparable to HTML.