

JSON is at least as open as XML, perhaps more so because it is not in the center of corporate/political standardization struggles. JSON has the same interoperability potential as XML. JSON is not a document markup language, so it is not necessary to define new tags or attributes to represent data in it. JSON is not extensible because it does not need to be. JSON has a much smaller grammar and maps more directly onto the data structures used in modern programming languages. XML is simpler than SGML, but JSON is much simpler than XML. Let's compare XML and JSON on the attributes that the XML community considers important. JSON promises the same benefits of interoperability and openness, but without the disadvantages. ) suggest that XML has big problems as a data-interchange format, but the disadvantages are compensated for by the benefits of interoperability and openness. The most informed opinions on XML (see for example That notation is JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). There is another text notation that has all of the advantages of XML, but is much better suited to data-interchange. It turns out that that first reaction was the correct one. When most programmers saw XML for the first time, they were shocked at how ugly and inefficient it was. It carries a lot of baggage, and it doesn't match the data model of most programming languages. Unfortunately, XML is not well suited to data-interchange, much as a wrench is not well-suited to driving nails. That there wasn't much left to fight about (or so it seemed). The fact that XML was already a W3C standard meant

These together encouraged a higher level of application-independence than otherĭata-interchange formats. XML provides two enormous advantages as a data representation language: Most of the excitement around XML is around a new role as an interchangeable data serialization format. This is because the formatting and structuring of documents is a complicated business. Even so, a good reference book on HTML is an inch thick. HyperText Markup Language (HTML), by comparison, is even simpler. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a text format derived from Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).
