Also whitespace handling. XML is still based on SGML and its idea that a document is basically a single string of text with certain substrings &quot;marked up&quot; with metadata. This assumption is of course completely false for the overwhelming majority of XML use cases. Yet, it still influences many design decisions and processing steps in the XML toolchain, the most prominent being that simply formatting an XML document may change its contents.<p>JSON is a lot more &quot;honest&quot; in this respect, in that it&#x27;s core data model is already useful for many applications, even without additional standards bolted on top of it. (Though those exist, this article being one of them)