Should the Ajax term be changed to Ajaj? Since Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, but with more and more the web favoring JSON (especially in rich Ajax applications), should it now be called Ajaj and stand for Asynchronous JavaScript and JSON?
The reason that I bring this up is that James Clark one of the major contributors of XML is now saying that JSON is now the way of, at least, the "Cool" web. The post where James talks about this is called XML vs the Web.
Below is an excerpt from his post.
If other formats start to supplant XML, and they support these goals better than XML, I will be happy rather than worried.
From this perspective, my reaction to JSON is a combination of "Yay" and "Sigh".
It's "Yay", because for important use cases JSON is dramatically better than XML. In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this. The fundamental problem is the mismatch between programming language data structures and the XML element/attribute data model of elements. This leaves the developer with three choices, all unappetising:
* live with an inconvenient element/attribute representation of the data;
* descend into XML Schema hell in the company of your favourite data binding tool;
* write reams of code to convert the XML into a convenient data structure.By contrast with JSON, especially with a dynamic programming language, you can get a reasonable in-memory representation just by calling a library function.
Norman argues that XML wasn't designed for this sort of thing. I don't think the history is quite as simple as that. There were many different individuals and organisations involved with XML 1.0, and they didn't all have the same vision for XML. The organisation that was perhaps most influential in terms of getting initial mainstream acceptance of XML was Microsoft, and Microsoft was certainly pushing XML as a representation for exactly this kind of data. Consider SOAP and XML Schema; a lot of the hype about XML and a lot of the specs built on top of XML for many years were focused on using XML for exactly this sort of thing.
You can read the full post here.
While I don't think that XML will ever totally go away (nor should it), I do think that in most Ajax applications that JSON makes more sense to use (with the biggest exception being if you just want to display the data). So go out there and start using Ajaj!
