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Re: Not using mixed content? Then don't use XML

• From: Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>
• To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
• Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2013 10:10:34 +0000

At http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlApplications.html is a list of several 
hundred application vocabularies developed using XML syntax: and in 2005 
they stopped counting.

Is there a similar list for JSON? Not one that I'm aware of. If there 
are standard interchange formats built on top of JSON, I would love to 
know about them. If I were setting out today to develop something like 
XBRL, I would be quite tempted to use JSON rather than XML in the hope 
of making programming easier, but I think I would quickly discover a 
lack of tools: tools for specifying the application-level format, tools 
for validating and processing instances. And in the end, I'm not sure I 
would have made anyone's life easier, because the complexity of handling 
something like XBRL does not arise because XML is complex, but because 
XBRL is complex; the way it's encoded at layer 6 is pretty well irrelevant.

As far as I can tell, JSON (like CSV) is used almost entirely for 
private data interchange between consenting applications, not for 
standardised data formats. (I'm pleased to be corrected if I am wrong).

Michael Kay
Saxonica

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Not using mixed content? Then don't use XML
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>

• References:
  • Not using mixed content? Then don't use XML
    • From: "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>