Comment by alpaca128

One reason would be massively reduced syntax overhead and better readability. I've seen plenty of XML files where XML syntax makes up more than 50% of the file's content, and trying to read the actual content is tedious. Now JSON isn't ideal either - technically you could get rid of all commas, colons, and the quotes around most keys - but I sure prefer `{"foo": "some \"stuff\""}` over something like `<foo><![CDATA[some <stuff>]]></foo>`