[JonathonW]

Plists are nifty, but the text format's XML-based, which makes it too complex and too verbose to be a general-purpose alternative to something like JSON.

(plutil "supports" a json format, but it's not capable of expressing the complete feature set of the XML or binary formats.)

[pjmlp]

I don't get this gripe with XML, it is meant to be used by tools not to be written by hand.

Where is the XPath and XQuery for JSON?

Do people really think that manually iterating over the whole JSON document to find the data or writing yet another parser, is better?

[jon-wood]

http://jmespath.org/

[pjmlp]

Any solid Java, C#, C++ libraries?

[bct]

The XML serialization Apple defined for plists is awful and not easy to query with XPath.