Re: [xml-dev] Not using mixed content? Then don't use XML

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

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