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Now that Drupal 8 has built-in support for Web Services, you’re likely thinking about exposing the content in your site with an API. But should you make the data available in JSON, XML, or both?

A Short History of XML and JSON

XML and JSON are the primary formats used for data exchange on the web. XML was born when some individuals involved in the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) effort became early adopters of the Web. SGML is a way of defining languages for marking up documents, like HTML; XML borrowed many of the core principles and simplified the rest. The initial draft of XML was completed by a subcommittee of the W3C’s SGML Activity in 1996. Even in the early drafting process, it had support from many large technology companies.

In contrast, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is known for having been more discovered than invented: Douglass Crockford saw that language constructs already existing in JavaScript could be used to represent objects as strings. He coined the term JSON for this usage in 2001. It didn’t go through the standardization process, in part because it is a proper subset of the JavaScript standard. When Crockford was told by clients that they couldn’t use JSON because it wasn’t a standard, he bought json.org and put up a Web page declaring it a standard. JSON slowly gained popularity as people discovered the page. Since then, it has become an official standard, and support for encoding to and decoding from JSON has been added to many languages.

The choice between these two has been a topic of debate for nearly a decade.

Why is JSON Better?

JSON is lightweight. It often takes fewer characters to transmit the same information. For example, compare the following data in XML with the same data in JSON.

XML:
<pre>
<root>
<foo>text goes here</foo>
<bar>and here</bar>
</root>

JSON: