XML and JSON in 2026
The article discusses the current status and future of JSON and XML as data interchange formats. JSON, celebrating its 25th anniversary, remains unchanged and widely used, while XML is considered by some to be obsolete. Both technologies have had significant impacts, but their relevance is now largely taken for granted.
- ▪JSON is 25 years old and remains immutable, with no plans for a new RFC despite accumulated errata.
- ▪XML is viewed by some as a failed experiment, yet it has proven successful in establishing a data interchange format independent of various computing environments.
- ▪Both JSON and XML are now largely taken for granted, with many developers not needing to think about them anymore.
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Record
| Original publisher | ongoing by Tim Bray |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/06/01/XML-and-JSON-in-2026 |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:46:43 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T07:11:58.481Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T07:11:58.481Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Vqq7uALt5-vR |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The best thing about long-lived incumbent technologies like JSON and XML is that nobody really has to think about them much any more. Except for, I do occasionally, because while I’m not the inventor of either, my name’s on the front of both official specifications. Hey, it’s JSON’s 25th birthday, what a run! And what ever happened to XML? Let’s shake off the dust and have a look. JSONiana · RFC 8259 is now nine years old and, like all the RFCs, is immutable. And, as is usually the case, a list of errata has built up over the years. Until a few days ago, many of the errata apparently hadn’t ever been looked at for a period measured in years. Now they’ve all been rejected or accepted.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at ongoing by Tim Bray.
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