[OT] is JSON all that great? - was Re: API Help

[Michael Torrie]

On 06/14/2017 05:06 PM, justin walters wrote:
> JSON in Python is such a joy! :)

I understand that in this case the data is coming from a server in a
form intended for easy use with Javascript.  But other than this type of
communication, I don't see any good reason to choose JSON as a data
interchange format.

To me JSON seems to hold no real benefits over other serialization
techniques, including the XML beast. XML may be verbose, but at least
XML data can be formally validated and formally transformed and queried,
which is certainly not the case with JSON as we can see from this long
thread.  JSON's mantra seems to be try parsing it and see what happens.
Whether it works depends on the parser and any quirks it has (quotes vs
single quotes, etc).  I don't find JSON any more human readable than XML
to be honest, perhaps less so because there's no way to define a formal
schema to follow, at least that I'm aware of.