what else do you do with a data structure besides walk it at some point? JSON comes out as an acyclic object graph in javascript, so what it still needs to be walked to actually do something with the data.
The difference between walking JSON and XML is simply the syntax of the parser library your are using.
The problem with XML is it has things that don't map directly to most OO languages, like node order matters, and attributes and elements are similar but different things, and mixed content.
So JSON is nice simply because it's close the the OO style everyone is used to today, and is in fact a subset of one of those languages.
IMO either way we need to settle on a way to interchange structured data, and agree on data types, but I would prefer some binary format, text encoding all this data such a waste of space/time.
Reiterating the point the blog post makes, but: It's very very easy to structure the same data in different ways in XML. While JSON has the same issue, it's a lot harder to do and you have less flexibility in making bad storage decisions.
You are absolutely right on walking the structure. JSON just tends to be easier (in my experience), even when working with XML libraries that make it less of a pain.
The difference between walking JSON and XML is simply the syntax of the parser library your are using.
The problem with XML is it has things that don't map directly to most OO languages, like node order matters, and attributes and elements are similar but different things, and mixed content.
So JSON is nice simply because it's close the the OO style everyone is used to today, and is in fact a subset of one of those languages.
IMO either way we need to settle on a way to interchange structured data, and agree on data types, but I would prefer some binary format, text encoding all this data such a waste of space/time.