Simon Willison’s Weblog

Seems easy to me; if you want to serialize a data structure that’s not too text-heavy and all you want is for the receiver to get the same data structure with minimal effort, and you trust the other end to get the i18n right, JSON is hunky-dory.

— Tim Bray

Posted 22nd December 2006 at 12:47 am

Tagged json, timbray, xml

3 comments

As usual, Tim says in a single sentence what I was trying to get at with a whole essay.

Simon Willison - 22nd December 2006 01:06 - #
Wow, when the co-inventer of XML endorses JSON, who wouldnt?

Adam Platti - 22nd December 2006 04:45 - #
I think I need to extend my quoting system to let my add a bit of extra commentary. It's important to read Tim's quote in context; he follows it up with a sensible argument as to when to use XML instead:

If you want to provide general-purpose data that the receiver might want to do unforeseen weird and crazy things with, or if you want to be really paranoid and picky about i18n, or if what you're sending is more like a document than a struct, or if the order of the data matters, or if the data is potentially long-lived (as in, more than seconds) XML is the way to go.

Simon Willison - 22nd December 2006 09:13 - #