Data Exchange Formats

XML

• Extensible Markup Langugae
• XML doesnot do anything. It is just an information wrapped in tags.
• XMl was designed to carry data like HTML is to display data.
• XMl tags are not predefined like HTML tags.

Rules

• All XML tags are case sensitive.
• XMl elements must be properly nested.
• XML attributes values nust be quoted.
• Each XML tags needs to be strictly closed with a close tag whereas the rule is not strict in HTML.

Example

<country>
    <name>Nepal</name>
    <capital>Kathmandu</capital>
    <region>South Asia</region>
    <neighbor>India</neighbor>
</country>

JSON

• JavaScript Object Notation
• It is a lightweight data-interchange format.
• It is easy for humans to read and write.
• It is easy for machines to parse and generate.
• It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language.

Rules

• JSON is case sensitive.
• JSON uses double quotes (") instead of single quotes (') for string values.
• JSON uses a colon (:) instead of an equals (=) for key/value pairs.
• JSON uses a comma (,) instead of a semi-colon (;) for separating values.
• The key should be string, but the values can be any type like number, boolean, object, array, etc.

Example

{
    "name": "Nepal",
    "capital": "Kathmandu",
    "region": "South Asia",
    "neighbor": "India"
}

JSON vs XML

JSON	XML
It is JavaScript Object Notation	It is Extensible markup language
It is based on JavaScript language.	It is derived from SGML.
It is a way of representing objects.	It is a markup language and uses tag structure to represent data items.
It does not provides any support for namespaces.	It supports namespaces.
It supports array.	It doesn’t supports array.
Its files are very easy to read as compared to XML.	Its documents are comparatively difficult to read and interpret.
It doesn’t use end tag.	It has start and end tags.
It is less secured.	It is more secured than JSON.
It doesn’t supports comments.	It supports comments.
It supports only UTF-8 encoding.	It supports various encoding.