Hacker News Reader

Comment by daigoba66 | Hacker News Reader

Off topic, but why JSON over XML? What are the technical advantages for using JSON instead of XML (and don't say anything about "human readable"). If you're consuming the data with JavaScript, I'll grant you that JSON has quite an edge. But most every language has standard libs for XML. Both are easy to parse, but XML is easier to validate given a schema definition.

View on HN

JSON is considerably more compact, especially if you use lists instead of maps. For a list of numbers, there is only one character of overhead per item. For a list of strings, it's three characters per item.

Of course you can embed comma-separated lists in XML, but with JSON it will parse them for you.

(And of course it's not as good as a protobuf, but not bad for a text format.)

Because of closing tags, XML is approximately twice as noisy as JSON encoding. If response sizes and the network traffic they entail are a concern, JSON is worth considering. If response sizes + validation are necessary, something like Protocol Buffers or Thrift may also fit, as they are widely supported as well.

If your data touches the network, conform xml parsing is an attack vector (billion laughs, external entity exploits, ...) and non-conform xml parsing ends up being a headache. Even more, the sheer absurd complexity of xml contains so much stuff, who knows how many more exploits by specification are in there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com