JSON has no notion of object "type". So if you have a list of things, whose processing is determined by their type, you may need to parse the entire object before finding the key/value pair that distinguishes its type.
Because XML puts the "type" of an object syntactically first, it supports this use case.
Pity they don't use it for npm, which cannot create a local search index because of this: it tries to load a large JSON file into memory and fails. I never was able to do this on my VM despite trying to give it more memory (up to 2 GB, at which point I gave up).
colanderman|9 years ago
Because XML puts the "type" of an object syntactically first, it supports this use case.
Mikhail_Edoshin|9 years ago