> 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 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-*.