Comments on: JSON vs XML

By: Eric Bloch

Eric Bloch — Fri, 07 May 2010 02:50:26 +0000

The reason JSON may "win" is because Javascript isthe language in the browser and, even though it has issues, it doesn't appear in HTML5 timeframe that we'll have another choice. Having literals for data (as opposed to DOM) is a HUGE benefit. And, in the end, that is a big reason why having JSON in the server simplifies things. Less conversion is a good thing.

I agree XML will be here for a long time, too. But it will be become a second-class citizen over time as a data encoding choice for some languages, tools, and so on.

By: Barry

Barry — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 02:55:53 +0000

Is anyone worried that JSON is very tightly bound to Java-Script. How do you provide web services to both servers and browsers?

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:36:19 +0000

@dret: I'm not proposing getting rid of attributes from the literal XML text, just making them syntactic sugar for single-valued elements in the processing model (ie. so that my code doesn't have to look like a dog's breakfast whenever I have to do deal with XML that contains both data-as-attribute-values and data-as-element-values).

More generally, if Justin's post is intended to foster discussion on what an "XML++" might look like, then I think a new kind of XML "that wouldn't be XML anymore" is absolutely on the table - his namespace simplification straw man being a good example.

By: dret

dret — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 02:19:20 +0000

@peter: many have proposed to get rid of attributes. for data-oriented people, this makes a lot of sense. for document-oriented people, this is just inconceivable. try to think of an HTML without attributes; not very pretty, right? plus, some essential XML mechanics (most notably, namespaces) depend on attributes, and i don’t even want to think what namespaces would look like if they had to be stuffed into elements. it’s nice that some technologies (such as RELAX NG) try to mitigate the distinction where appropriate, but these things are different in many ways, and XML without attributes probably would be different enough from XML so that it wouldn’t be XML anymore.

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By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:04:47 +0000

What about dropping the (imvho artificial) distinction between attributes and elements (as has been done in JSON)? To my way of thinking attributes are simply a shorthand notation for a single valued element, so while there are arguably some benefits in allowing both for human comprehensibility, from the processing models perspective there’s an argument that they should be treated identically (ie. with elements as the fundamental construct, since they’re a strict superset of attributes).