Thinking about it, it has 1% to do with the format at 99% to do with various lock-in mechanisms. The explosion of the web and JSON being the standard for JS definitely helped it alot! Protobuf has done pretty well on the backend based on the "won't get fired for copying Google". XML had it's own lock-ins, being the basis of XHTML at that time, and Microsoft had a big fetish for SOAP.
quickthrower2|2 years ago