Rececently I have been reading a lot of books on AJAX and Web 2.0. Many of the books and articles compare the JSON data format quite favorably to XML. "JSON can do anything XML can do. Its more efficient. It's cleaner. It's faster. blah blah blah."

So if you haven't seen JSON, let me show you two simple examples.

Date in XML

<date>
   <month>06</month>
   <monthDay>08</monthDay>
   <year>2007</year>
</date>
	

Date in JSON

{"date":{
    "month":"06",
    "monthDay":"08",
    "year":"2007"
	}
}

	

Granted I'm a little biased towards XML, but I just don't see buy the JSON hype. A couple of points I would like to make.

• Sure, JSON reduces the tag overhead of XML. But, when would you ever send enough data for tag overhead to matter? If your application sends enough data for tag overhead to impact performance, I'm guessing your application is sending too much data at one time.
• JSON should be good at handling data that fits nicely into grids, like a relational database or spreadsheet. Once you have narrative data like a blog or a word processing document, methinks JSON isn't going to work so great.
• If you ever need to edit data by hand, JSON looks like a nightmare to me. Imagine trying to keep the commas, colons, and brackets straight in a 1k or 2k file. No fun.

Being able to turn the data instantly into an object is cool. So JSON is definitely worth checking out. But it certainly is no "all powerful" solution to data exchange problems.