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> JSON is also easier for humans to read than XML.

That's extremely debatable.

Writing JSON is also easier by hand than XML, or at-least it is for me. Any time I'm planning a data structure I always use JSON since it's so well structured.

XML is quite loose, unless I use plist theres no data types which is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

But is parsing an RSS-like format that uses JSON a solved problem?

That's just parsing JSON and interpreting the data. Since parsing JSON and producing arbitrary object models is a solved problem, parsing an x-like format that uses JSON is also a solved problem for all x (developing the object model to use for it is an issue, perhaps, but you have to have that before you can have any serialization format, so that's not a distinguishing problem between different approaches.)

Note that I am not, here, endorsing JSON over other alternatives; the same is obviously true of XML, HTML, YAML, or lots of other potential formats.

Right, the only point I'm making is that ease of parsing JSON shouldn't count as a factor against RSS since RSS parsing is already more done than parsing any JSON-powered RSS alternative as the object model is already defined and implemented.