I'm not a professional coder. And I mostly work with tabular data, in spreadsheets and SQL. I like to get my data as delimited text files. Ideally, delimited with some character that's 100% guaranteed to never occur in the data. In my experience, "|" is often a good option, but you never know. And CSV, even with quotes, can be a nightmare, especially if the data contains addresses. Or names with quoted nicknames.

Anyway, given the choice, I always pick JSON over XML. Because with JSON, I can always identify the data blocks that I need, and parse them out with bash and spreadsheets. Not with XML, however. Just as not with HTML.