Comment by mpyne
3 hours ago
> lazy and forgiving technologies drive out the better but stricter ones.
JSON is not "lazy and forgiving" (seriously, go try adding a comment to it).
It was just laser-focused on what the actual problem was that needed to be solved by many devs in day-to-day practice.
Meanwhile XML wanted to be an entire ecosystem, its own XML Cinematic Universe, where you had to adopt it all to really use it.
It's not surprising to me that JSON won out, but it's not because it's worse, it's actually much better than XML for the job it ended up being used for (a generic format to transfer state between running programs supporting common data structures with no extraneous add-ons or requirements).
XML is better for a few other things, but those things are far less commonly needed.
Don’t know if I would describe it as much better. I see it similar to the whole SQL -> NOSQL -> let’s add all the feature and end up with SQL. JSON undergo a similar story with the difference that we didn’t go back to XML. What I mean is to simplify and then realize what was actually missing. But I agree for the smaller services and state transfer especially in web XML was just too damn big and verbose. But conceptually it was great.