The ascendancy of JSON

I’ve long been in despair over the popularity of XML as an information interchange format.  My main complaint is that is so verbose that it is very easy to end up with the XML document structure taking up more memory than the actual data it encodes.  This phenomenon is so common it even has a name: the ‘Angle Bracket Tax‘ and can be very painful on memory or bandwidth limited embedded systems.

JSON is based on a subset of the JavaScript scripting language and this is one of the big drivers of its adoption is that JSON is trivial to work with in JavaScript applications.  Mainstream adoption is taking place with languages like Python and Ruby and frameworks like Microsoft’s .Net offering JSON support.

Karsten Januszewski has an interesting post on ‘The Rise of JSON‘ that is well worth checking out.

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