Right, but you inevitably end up with boilerplate "massage" code around your data anyway. Case in point: dates, any number that isn't just a number e.g. currencies or big numbers, URLs, file paths, hex, hashes. Basically any type that carries any kind of semantics beyond array, object, string, number, or null will require this boilerplate, only that your data format has no way of describing them except for out-of-band specs, if you want to call them such.

At least XML has schemas, and even if all you're doing is deserializing everything into JsonML like objects you're still better off because you'll have in-band metadata to point you in the right direction.

This is really only true in dynamically typed languages. From personal experience: parsing json in Java or Go without just treating everything as a bag of Object or an interface{} requires a ton of menial boilerplate work.

Super nice in python/ruby/javascript, though.

Of course, JSON doesn't support complex numbers, bignums, rationals, cryptographic keys &c. And it'd be even worse than XML to try to represent programs in.

JSON is definitely easier to decompose into a simple-to-manipulate bag-of-values than is XML.

I think that depends what you mean by "using it".

XML can convey a lot more semantic meaning than JSON ever will, and standardisation of things like XPath, DOM, XSLT, etc provides a lot of power when working with XML documents.

With JSON, essentially everything is unknown. You can't just get all child nodes of an object, or get all objects of a certain type, using standard methods. You need to know what object key 'child' nodes are referenced by, or loop through them all and hope that what you find is actually an array of child nodes, and not e.g. an array of property values. Finding all objects of a given type means knowing how the type is defined, AND the aforementioned "how do i get child nodes" to allow you to traverse the document.

Of course that assumes what you have is a document, and not just a string encoded as JSON. Or a bool/null.

My point is, the tooling around XML is very mature. "Use" of a data format is a very broad topic, and covers a lot more than just "i want to get this single property value".

Absolutely. Right tool for the right job. Mixed content (perhaps a paragraph with bold and italics) is absolutely horrible in JSON because it lacks the complexity that XML has to cope with this.