alt Hacker News> It's designed to be written by hand.
This assertion is comically out of touch with reality, particularly when trying to describe JSON as something that is merely "readable by humans". You could not do anything at all with XML without having to employ half a dozen frameworks and tools and modules.
You can do everything you can do with JSON by just knowing the basic syntax (<element attribute=""></element>).
The complexity about XML comes from the many additional languages and tools built on top of it.
Many are too complex and bloated, but JSON has little to nothing comparable, so it's only simple because it doesn't support what XML does.