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I think I can see something of where you're coming from. But a question:

You complain about dates in JSON (really a specific case of parsing text in JSON):

> If they implement dates, sometimes it's unix-time, sometimes it's 1000x off from > that, sometimes it's a ISO8601-inspired string, and fuck sometimes I just get an > HTTP date. And so on.

Sure, but does not XML have the exact same problem because everything is just a text?

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> Sure, but does not XML have the exact same problem because everything is just a text?

No, you can specify what type an attribute (or element) is in the XSD (for example, xs:dateTime or xs:date). And there is only one way to specify a date in XML, and it's ISO8601. Of course JSON schema does exist, but it's mostly an afterthought.

It sounds to me like you are thinking something like: if they use XML, they'll have a well defined schema and will follow standardized XML types. But if they use JSON they may not have a well-defined schema at all, and may not follow any sort of standardized formats.

But to my mind, whether they have a well-defined schema and follow proper datatypes really has very little to do with the choice of XML or JSON.

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