[pointlessone]

I understand what you're getting at but that is you choosing higher complexity baseline. Yes, it's a part of a standard but you can chose not to support it. No one said you have to support all of XML-verse in order to use it effectively in your particular application. The most common cases are usable without any of it. Look at most RSS/Atom feeds, XHTML, SVG. They all can get by with simple tags and and attributes.

I'm just not buying the argument that XML's complexity is somehow remediated in JSON. JSON becomes as horrible as XML when you bring it up to feature parity. And that's when there's a way to match features. Whatever people say about XSLT, it is powerful, reasonably well defined, and generic over all documents (even though complex). There's nothing like it for JSON I know of.