Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business.
There is a reason why JSON is becoming very popular as a data exchange format (more important than it being less verbose than XML): programmers are sick of writing parsers! But “wait”, you say – “surely there are XML parsers available for you to use so that you don’t have to roll your own…”. Yes, there are. But while XML parsers handle the low-level syntactic parsing of XML tags, attributes, etc…, you still need to walk the DOM tree or, worse, build one yourself with nothing but a SAX parser (Objective-C iPhone SDK I’m looking at you!). And that code you write will of course depend on whether the XML you need to make sense of looks like this: