Another thing I disagree with is the idea that JSON uses fewer characters. This is not true: JSON uses more characters. Example:

    <aaaa bbbb="bbbb" cccc="cccc"/>
    {"bbbb":"bbbb","cccc":"cccc"}

See that the difference is only two characters? Yet XML also has a four-character element name, which JSON lacks. And JSON is packed to the limit, while XML is written naturally and is actually more readable than JSON.