[meinersbur]

> Douglas: [...] It doesn’t look like it should be complicated. It’s just angle brackets, but the semantics of XML can be really complicated, and they assumed it was complicated for a reason.

> Adam: [...] He also wanted people to use JavaScript properly – use semicolons, use a functional style, don’t use a vowel, use JSLint and so on.

They could have done the same with XML, i.e. define a simple-XML subset without schema, CDATA, entities, etc. Instead they built it on top of another language that is so infamous that they felt the need to write JSLint.

> Adam: The thing they came up with, Doug’s idea for sending JavaScript data back and forth, they didn’t even give it a name. It just seemed like the easiest way to talk between the client side and the backend, a way to skip having to build XML parser in JavaScript.

So the original reason was that they could use eval(jsonstr)? Because of the security implications they better had written a JSON parser. At that point, is it any better than writing a simple-XML parser? At least, that would have saved them from the "it's not a standard" discussions.