Re: [xml-dev] XML vs JSON

Well, if your sentence ...

"The key difference is that JSON is designed to make it easy for programs to exchange data with each other, whereas XML is designed to represent documents."

must be read with "documents" meaning document-oriented (or narrative, or simply - mixed-content) XML, it does not make sense to me. (I have spent fifteen years with processing data-oriented XML, missing the point of XML's design?)

I propose this alternative:

"The key difference is that JSON is designed to make it easy for programs to exchange data with each other, whereas XML is designed to represent information."

Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> schrieb am 10:44 Montag, 21.August 2017:

>
> A document-oriented XML document looks more like an HTML page with mixed content, XHTML and docbook being two prominent examples:
>
> <paragraph>This is <bold>bold</bold> text and this is <italic>italic</italic> text</paragraph>

>

I like to say that the defining characteristic of pure document-oriented XML (I sometimes call it "narrative XML") is that if you remove the markup, you are left with meaningful human-readable text.

And I always felt that the reason XML became so popular was not its ability to handle pure narrative XML, but its ability to mix structured data and textual narrative in a single message. So often (consider a CV/resume) you want to handle both at the same time. XML thus brought document processing capability to the data processing masses; and by reverting to JSON, the data processing masses are saying "that's too difficult for us to cope with".

Michael Kay
Saxonica
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