Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. JSON

With the popularity of web services around 2004, XML practically became the de facto standard for data transmission. However, XML is not without its detractors. Some consider it to be overly verbose for data transmission purposes, necessitating the sending of many more bytes across the Internet to accomplish what could have been done in a much smaller form. Because of this consideration, new forms of XML compression and even entirely new XML formats, such as Binary XML, have been developed. All these solutions work on extending or adding on to XML, making backward compatibility an issue. Douglas Crockford, a long-time software engineer, proposed a new data format built on JavaScript, called JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).