When you say that someone's been confusing syntax and internal representation, are you speaking of yourself? You don't parse XML as JSON, though you might pars

When you say that someone's been confusing syntax and internal representation, are you speaking of yourself? You don't parse XML as JSON, though you might parse XML and serialize the resulting internal representation as JSON. Also, XML is the syntactic representation of the document model, so your JSON isn't XML because it's a different sequence of characters. That said, the JSON representation has a bug: what if there are multiple child elements? A fix would be using numeric indices for the children rather than the empty string. Then it would look both like an object with keys (attributes) and an array (of elements). Though, if you want to serialize that back into XML, you would need to make sure you never use non-strings as attribute values! Another bug is that the objects don't maintain their tag name; writing code to process data in this representation would be fairly annoying because a pointer to an element would be an object plus a key, rather than just an object. A fix for this would be to have a "tag" key inside the object.