Dotnet Stuff

JSON and XML are the two most common formats for information exchange.

XML is from World Wide Web Consortium(W3C). JSON is introduced by Douglas Crockford.

Although they are not introduced for same purposes, still their more frequent use is information exchange between software applications.

Applications which deal with document handling are using XML (eg: MS Word)

Applications which are more data involved uses JSON (eg: Facebook)

Both XML and JSON are, Open standards on the Web, Human readable and Machine readable.

We cannot completely say one is better than the other, both formats have advantages over the other in specific situations. See the syntax representation of same data in XML and JSON format here

<Blog>
     <Article>
        <Title>JSON vs XML </Title> 
          <Author>Rajeev</Author>
     </Article>
     <Article>
        <Title>Difference Between JSON and XML</Title>
        <Author>Rajeev</Author>
     </Article>
    <Article>
       <Title>XML Vs JSON</Title> 
       <Author>Rajeev</Author>
    </Article>
</Blog>

JSON Syntax

{"
   Blog":
     [
       { "Title":"JSON vs XML", "Author":"Rajeev" },
       { "Title":"Difference Between JSON and XML", "Author":"Rajeev" },
       { "Title":"XML vs JSON", "Author":"Rajeev" }
    ]
}

Major JSON Advantages over XML

JSON is compact and  more readable

JSON can be faster because it is light weighted and less data is transferred.

JSON’s syntax is similar to conventional programming syntax.

XML Advantages over JSON

XML handles metadata information in the better manner, using attributes.

With JSON, the programmer could accomplish the same goal that metadata achieves by making the entity an object and adding the attributes as members of the object.

XML has the ability to resolve name conflicts, prefixes etc. But JSON doesn’t have this power.By having prefixes, the developer can name two different kinds of entities the same thing.This is beneficial in cases where the different entities can have the same name in the client application if their scopes are totally different.

JSON vs XML

See a tabular comparison of difference between JSON and XML format