[martijndwars]

Whether parsing XML is easy or hard, how often do you actually write an XML parser? If I'm digesting a JSON/XML document, I resort to a parser library for the language that I'm using at that point, so the complexity of writing such a parser is pretty much non-existent. Definitely not a compelling reason to switch to JSON.

[morgante]

Most XML parsers I've used are leaky abstractions. Even once the document is parsed, actually accessing the data can require a lot more complexity than accessing parsed JSON data.

[weberc2]

IIRC, the popular C++ implementations were glorified tokenizers. It was up to you to figure out which tokens were data and how those tokens related to each other.

[icebraining]

Ah, SAX. People built some true horrors with that API, just because it was "more performant" than DOM. Never mind that their hacked-together tree builders often leaked like sieves.