XML became popular because of its human readability compared to binary and allowed disparate systems to cooperate. JSON is even more readable and allowed the whole XLST thing to be ignored, making a dev's life easier, and really took off with node.
Binary is not gone, but you don't see a lot of it in the 'web world', because everyone in that space is JSON, almost exclusively.
Having written many parsers, binary is by far and away the easiest: provided your language/environment supports it. That is, binary in js is a pain, because you don't have native ints and floats. In js, JSON is the base atomic data structure, so it makes complete sense that it's used... But in c/c++ and co. JSON is harder and introduces a lot of overhead/ quirks which simply don't exist in binary (provided you cover the buffer overruns and co.)
> XML became popular because of its human readability compared to binary and allowed disparate systems to cooperate. JSON is even more readable and allowed the whole XLST thing to be ignored, making a dev's life easier, and really took off with node.
XML was simply never designed to represent structured data. It was meant to represent document markup in a way that was both simpler and more extensible than SGML.
If there's one thing the industry always seems to do, its embrace some technology hammer as the solution for every problem. Before XML some people were trying to trade around relational database dumps as data interchange formats, because relational databases were the golden hammer.
JSON is being abused by being stretched beyond its sweet spot as well, but there aren't industry consortiums necessarily pushing bad ideas like there was with SOAP and WS-*.
JSON has JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE), compare that to XML-Dsig and XML-Enc. It has OpenAPI/Swagger, which is close to SOAP/WSDL. It has JSON-Schema, which is close to XML-Schema. It has OpenID Connect, which is literally SAML, but with JSON instead of XML.
If you're missing anything out of WS-* in JSON, you can be sure somebody is working on a spec for it.
XML became popular because of its human readability compared to binary and allowed disparate systems to cooperate. JSON is even more readable and allowed the whole XLST thing to be ignored, making a dev's life easier, and really took off with node.
Binary is not gone, but you don't see a lot of it in the 'web world', because everyone in that space is JSON, almost exclusively.
Having written many parsers, binary is by far and away the easiest: provided your language/environment supports it. That is, binary in js is a pain, because you don't have native ints and floats. In js, JSON is the base atomic data structure, so it makes complete sense that it's used... But in c/c++ and co. JSON is harder and introduces a lot of overhead/ quirks which simply don't exist in binary (provided you cover the buffer overruns and co.)