[seagreen]

First: XML is a markup language for encoding documents, JSON is a data-interchange language. Each can be twisted to do the job of the other, but they don't naturally do the same job.

Second, XML is extraordinarily complicated. Flipping around the XML 1.0 spec (https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/) isn't really encouraging me that all of this is there for a reason. I'd love to be proved wrong though!

In contrast, RFC 7159 is incredibly short and readable: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159. The TJSON spec isn't bad either: https://www.tjson.org/spec/. Even combining both the result is still far shorter and more clear than XML.

[tootie]

First, either XML or JSON are suitable for encoding documents or data interchange. Second, XML is also very _sophisticated_ and has an array of useful features that JSON developers are suddenly realizing to be pretty valuable sometimes. XSD is verbose, but it's rock solid. XPath and XInclude are also pretty awesome.

[tobltobs]

If you want something lightweight and readable JSON is fine. If you need a solution which covers 99% of all possible requirements there is XML. Everything in between will converge to the feature set of XML over time, if it lives long enough.