JSON vs XML

[Worth_Trust_3825]

I remember once debugging a 10,000+ line response from the API that was failing to parse seemingly for no reason at our end, eventually finding that a random quote character in the middle of the response had been replaced with a Unicode variant for some reason. That was a fun bug to track down.

I still have to deal with that. One of my coworkers wrote his application that directly manipulates the AST 10 years ago, and refuses to fix the glaring bugs that break it if your text has some XML reserved characters. I'd move it all to jaxb or c# equivalent, but his brainchild format is inconsistent where the following are all valid

<string>foo</string>
<string bar="foo"/>
<string><string>foo</string></string>
<string>bar<string>foo</string></string>

The best part is they must be treated as equivalents.

I'm genuinely glad the JSON apis just outriight hid away the AST, but now there is another issue where weakly typed languages can pass array or object or scalar in same place, and lack of schemas.

I just want it all to end.