[arc33]

> XML is awful

I never really understood this. This seems to be an oft repeated truism from mid 2000s with little backing it up.

The only awesome thing that JSON did, was lose type information as well. In fact, the only thing that I can see that JSON brought to the table was easier editing by those who didn't have IDEs, at the expense of losing type information.

[willtim]

XML and especially XML schema are hugely complex and almost laughably difficult to bind to any mainstream programming language. It took Java over a decade to produce a binding that could (perhaps) handle an arbitrary schema. Types boil down to sums and products, I'm not convinced the designers of XML/XSD understood this. XML has so many overlapping concepts: elements, attributes, enumerations, choices, unions, sequences, lists, element/attribute groups, substitution groups, facets, simple types, complex types etc etc IMHO it's ad-hoc and ugly; we deserve better.

[mikl]

My main complaint with XML is that it’s far too complex for most use cases (like config files), and thus requires an unhealthy amount of tooling to work with.

I can’t just load the file and run it through a parser and get an easily accessible object structure back, I’ll need to navigate the document with DOM or XPath.

JSON with comments (aka JSONC) is in my opinion the best format in wide use today. It has structure and types, but not too many, and not a lot of magic, like YAML has, but for the most complex cases, JSON(C) falls short with its lack of extensibility and inheritance.