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> except XML feeds were then replaced by simpler files

Yes. XML was basically superceded by JSON, which was far less verbose and clunky.

XML in XMLHttpRequest was first superseded by HTML and then by JSON. And JSON only because the JavaScript API for XML (aka. the DOM API) is the worst thing imaginable compared to the simplicity offered by JSON.parse and then the JS native representation of it as objects. The same ugly DOM API let to the advent and rule of jQuery.

The success of JSON has less to do with verbose/clunkiness but a lot with the available APIs in the JavaScript frontend.

> compared to the simplicity offered by JSON.parse

JSON.parse() came a lot later. People started with eval(), which lead to quite some problems (executing code returned from some third party service, what could go wrong ....) and then various other attempts at parsing.

I was curious about this so I looked it up. We didn't have JSON.parse and JSON.stringify in place worldwide until fourteen years later. Horrible times.

https://caniuse.com/?search=JSON

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