[jtolmar]

If Cap'n Proto is a joke, JSON beat it to the punchline.

What's an efficient binary representation? C Structs. What's an efficient text representation? Javascript objects. But casting arbitrary data to a struct is a horrible idea. And eval'ing anonymous javascript is a horrible idea. Back to the drawing board.

Then N years later someone has the brilliant idea of just... not parsing these formats that idiotic way. And wrote a code generator because the smart way is tedious.

[edraferi]

I'd love to read the full story there - how JSON got so much momentum behind it. Do you know of a good overview blog post?

[kentonv]

In my view, JSON beat XML because it matched the way we structure data in code: records and lists. XML, meanwhile, wants us to represent data structures as text with tags, which isn't how we represent data internally at all, requiring laborious translation steps.

The fact that it was "built-in" to Javascript, of course, helped, by allowing it to compete on even footing (XML is also built in via XMLHttpRequest).