Comment by khedoros1

> JSON is 25 years old

And in 2004, didn't have a published specification, or much use outside of webdev (which hadn't eaten the world yet).

> and SAX parsers are 22

And, especially at the time, pretty much exclusive to Java, right?

Put another way, which are the high-quality open-source implementations of those formats that the developers should've considered while working on SA in 2003 and 2004? Or for that matter, in the 2001-2002 timeframe, when the parsing code was probably actually written for use in VC?