How does it suck harder? Sure, the closing tags can be a bit annoying (but decent editors can insert those automatically), but attributes don't have that problem, and contrary to JSON it has comments.
In my experience, the biggest reason people hate it is because it has too many ways of structuring data, and it allows people who design the schemas to go overboard. Attributes or child nodes? Multiple namespaces or just extend the one you have? CDATA or embedding?
That said, simple XML is as good as simple JSON. XML is fine if you keep it simple when designing the schema. AND of course one can screw up with JSON too. But after almost 20 years of people over-engineering their XML schemas, I can't fault anyone for choosing a simpler data format.
Recently I've had to work with XML config files for a tool called Oozie, which is a data pipeline scheduling tool within the hadoop/spark ecosystem, and it has been soul crushingly tedious for me. Everything feels verbose and opaque, the documentation seems to prioritize enumerating every possible configuration option over providing minimum viable configs for common use cases.
JSON configs often just feel more simple and developer friendly. I'd say this has less to do with technical differences between JSON and XML and more to do with how "modern" software systems have been designed to be more ergonomic for developers/administrators and these modern systems happen to be more likely to use JSON.
It's also fun to hear non-technical people at work talk about "Jason files".
Ha! That one always makes me smile. One of the best exchanges I’ve heard was something like:
“... and we’ll have JSON handle all the serialization”
“Jason? Oh we hired a new engineer?”
I really wish everyone would think of JSON as a French word. "Jay-sonne" (or jay-SAWN). Not "Jase-in"... it would help keep the confusion to a minimum.
Ha - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhVdWQWKRqM He starts by saying "Jason" but then suggests the French version. Love it!
I usually go the other way; Jasons I know have their names represented as "JSON" in my mind, and sometimes in written form.
I've heard people prefer JSON over XML because XML is too complex... and now we have json schemas, jsonpath... the namespaces can't be far away.
I'll admit that XML probably would be better without entities and the crazy whitespace handling.
In JSON they’re plain and simple. You even get to use good ‘ol [ ] delimiters.
In XML? It’s a sea of open and close tags.
Now do an array of arrays. Then hand-edit it.
Like I said, it’s no better. But it’s way easier to read.