> I rarely come across engineers who even know what XML is (no, it’s not an alternative encoding format to JSON).
Why? I've been around since HTML 1.0 and used to be a die-hard strict XHTML advocate (now I'm not just because today HTML5 still is written as pretty well-formed XML usually + has more semantic tags and is more readable and more unified this way) and actually love XML as I find it more readable than JSON but how I still don't get how is XML better than JSON in any aspect other than readability (which is subjective, many people say XML is pain to read). Sure, XML provides 2 distinct ways of expressing object properties and allows unencapsulated text within an element alongside subelements but I doubt these are a good things at all. I feel like I would even prefer JSON to replace HTML itself as it could introduce more order to the chaos and make the web more machine-readable.
Why? I've been around since HTML 1.0 and used to be a die-hard strict XHTML advocate (now I'm not just because today HTML5 still is written as pretty well-formed XML usually + has more semantic tags and is more readable and more unified this way) and actually love XML as I find it more readable than JSON but how I still don't get how is XML better than JSON in any aspect other than readability (which is subjective, many people say XML is pain to read). Sure, XML provides 2 distinct ways of expressing object properties and allows unencapsulated text within an element alongside subelements but I doubt these are a good things at all. I feel like I would even prefer JSON to replace HTML itself as it could introduce more order to the chaos and make the web more machine-readable.