&gt; People moan about XML readability somehow forget that it uses approximately the same syntax as HTML<p>No, they don&#x27;t.<p>&gt; Imagine HTML in JSON.<p>Yes, sure, JSON is a crappy text markup language, and would be much less readable than HTML <i>for that purpose</i>.<p>OTOH, readability when used as a markup language for content consisting largely of prose text and readability when used as a structured serialization format for data that <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> mostly consist of large blocks of annotated prose isn&#x27;t necessarily the same thing.