James Clark, technical lead for the World Wide Web Consortium’s XML activity, published a blog post today about the perceived competition between JSON and XML. Twitter and Foursquare both recently dropped support for XML, opting to use JSON exclusively. Clark doesn’t see XML going away, but sees it less and less as a Web technology. “I think the Web community has spoken,” Clark concludes. “And it’s clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON.” Clark cites a few particular reasons why JSON is winning the hearts and minds of web developers.
- JSON provides better language-independent representation of data structures.
- JSON has a simpler spec.
- JSON handles mixed content adequately Update: That’s not to say XML’s handling of mixed content is inadequate, only that JSON’s minimal mixed content support isn’t a deal breaker.
- XML seems “enteprisey.”
Clark, however, laments the fact that the web community will be missing out on the power of XML. He suggests that the best way forward for XML in the near future is improving XML’s integration with HTML5.
What do you think? Do you prefer XML or JSON, or do you use different ones for different purposes? What future does XML have?
