This is a long re-post of Dave Winer's blog, and I don't know how many geeks read my blog--but this is a very interesting thread. Click on the links and read the comments if you want to a) see how it's possible to have a civil dialog on the Web and b) learn a lot about XML, XML-RPC and JSON (a new one on me). Great holiday reading!
What makes things work.  First, thanks for a great discussion yesterday. The best part was there was only a little ad hominem bashing, much less than we used to have whenever we have a sprited discussion of technology. I remember when I couldn't say anything without getting surrounded by a bunch of really nasty personal stuff. Didn't happen yesterday. Almost from the beginning I started learning, and that's always appreciated. So thanks! Good work.
I might have felt a bit differently right off the top, about JSON if I hadn't read this bit of anti-XML propoganda on site that appears to be a JSON advocacy site. If I didn't know to question such things, given the domain name, json.org, it appears to be the advocacy site. Even if it isn't JSON-central, clearly there is some reinvention going on here.
 Back in the mid-90s, my first reaction to XML was to retch in horror at the inevitable politics that such a beast would certainly evoke. Back then I was very happy to be working on the web, I thought of it as the platform with no platform vendor, and I saw XML as a way of inviting all the would-be and former platform vendors back in to rule our lives, and prevent us from having any fun or making any money. Eventually I was won over, for one main reason -- interop is important. If I make software that has an open and easy to understand protocol for communicating with other instances of itself, then other people can write plug-compatible software, and users can choose between products based on features, performance and price, not compatibility. I had already seen the world melt down several times as the technology industry fought to form lock-in through various schemes to delude people into thinking they were open to being replaced, when they were anything but.
Fast-forward to 2006, after a lot of time was put in by a lot of people to get a teeny little bit of interop here and there, and predictably, it's being erased, of course, by the tech industry. I don't think there's any doubt about it. This just happens to be the week I took a look. I don't know why. Maybe I was bored. Maybe it was meant to be.
 Les Orchard, who I admire, and have worked with several times, says I shredded his product. I didn't mean to. However I did mean to shred the idea that everything can be redone at any time. Sure there are always lots of arguments in favor of starting over, but the one argument against it, imho, is the strongest, interop is sacred, and anything that throws out interop is highly suspect. One way to do things, no matter how flawed, is better than two, no matter how much better the new way is. The Perl community has a different motto, god bless em, but in the space where all languages interop, the less-is-more and worse-is-better approach is what makes things work.
So JSON isn't evil. It's just the internal object serialization format for JavaScript. No problem. But using it as a basis for interop, when there were already good ways to achieve interop is evil, imho. I don't think that's what del.icio.us did, but I do see some people advocating that, and I think they're wrong. Am I going to do anything more about it? No fucking way. There's a nasty war in Iraq, a national election next year, I just bought a house, I may want to write a book, and I'm fighting other battles that demand more of my attention. But I'm glad we could have this discussion, and please continue, I enjoy learning new stuff. [Scripting News]
9:05:22 PM 
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