[billyhoffman]

JSON won because parsing it on in the browser was just was a call to “eval()”, and then you just access the object using normal JS conventions/syntax (e.g data.foo[0].bar). Whereas XML required creating a DOM parser and document fragment, and then using cumbersome HTML DOM methods like “ getElementsByTagName()” to get each value directly (or worse Xpath). It totally sucked.

Native support for JSON parsing and stringify helped when it came later. The Selector api that also came later made XML parsing a little easier if you didn’t want to use XPath, but by then most things were JSON anyway.