[umvi]

> Your contrived example falls flat because JSON is flat out better for most use-cases and anyone having a discussion about it will probably fit into those use-cases.

Easy to say with hindsight now that it is massively popular and has a huge ecosystem of parsers for every conceivable language. At the time it was invented though, it was yet another data exchange format and I'm sure there were a lot of grey beards pooh-poohing it.

[DocTomoe]

Back in the day, XML was almost universally hated by the people you describe as "greybeards", mostly because it was a convoluted "one size fits all" approach, hijacked by business, that ate bandwidth for overhead with none of it's promised benefits actually materializing (because everyone created their own, quasi-proprietary XML Scheme).

[wolco]

I remember a .NET developer using it in place of json. That was the slowest system I've ever seen.