[agumonkey]

XML was just a few steps in the wrong direction and it diverted all users energy nowhere.

When I see sexp as serialization format I miss very few, same for json.. but xml wasn't that different. Just too much noise (ns,attributes) and just not enough genericity (no generic list or map) made it useless. Surprising.

[jayd16]

Turns out every language has lists and unordered maps. That's pretty much all you need.

When you start expecting ordered maps or add arbitrary attributes to container types things becomes exotic very quickly.

Reference could might be ok (some json APIs make it work) but it complicates the parsing.

And that doesn't even get into the hell of xml that actually executes code.

Not surprising to me that a smaller standard won out.