All languages have XML parsers, it's more that a lot suck, they might have weird concepts you have to use, or are constantly tripping you up with namespaces, or make it really hard to write xpath queries.
If that's putting the bar high, I really think I may be suffering a huge disconnect from the rest of my peers in terms of expected capabilities.
Just because JSON doesn't have namespacing-capabilities at all, doesn't make it a worthless feature. It's actually what gives you the eXtensibility in XML. As a developer I expect you to understand that.
(And I wonder how long time it will take before the JS-world re-implements this XML-wheel, while again doing so with a worse implementation)
The reason why many developers hate XML namespaces isn't the concept but the implementations which force you to repeat yourself everywhere. I think a significant amount of the grumbling would go away if XPath parsers were smart enough to assume that //tag was the same as //default-and-only-namespace:tag, or at least allowed you to use //name:tag instead of //{URI}tag because then you could write against the document as it exists rather than mentally having to translate names everywhere.
Yes, you can write code to add default namespaces when the document author didn't include them and pass in namespace maps everywhere but that's a lot of tedious boilerplate which requires regular updating as URLs change. Over time, people sour on that.
It really makes me wonder what it'd be like now if anyone had made an effort to invest in making the common XML tools more usable and other maintenance so e.g. you could actually rely on using XPath 2+.
> (And I wonder how long time it will take before the JS-world re-implements this XML-wheel, while again doing so with a worse implementation)
I'm going to guess never. I'm also going to guess that there isn't a single flamewar in the entire history of JSON where someone was trying to figure out how to implement anything close to XML namespaces in JSON. And by "close", I mean something that would require changes to JSON parsers and/or downstream APIs to accommodate potentially bipartite keys.
It's for making interoperable APIs, so there is a good motivation for namespaces. But the namespaces are much less intrusive than XML namespaces. Ordinary API consumers don't even have to see them.
One of the key design goals of JSON-LD was that -- unlike its dismal ancestor, RDF/XML -- it should produce APIs that people actually want to use.
All languages have XML parsers, it's more that a lot suck, they might have weird concepts you have to use, or are constantly tripping you up with namespaces, or make it really hard to write xpath queries.