What I'm seeing at work here is a form of bitter personal disappointment coming from an XML-centric viewpoint expecting the world to bow to XML for each and every information serialization task. And much like in a frustrating love affair, participants take incidental events for guidance, seeing those as contributions to an academic discourse, when in reality the invention of JSON was just an ultra-practical trick based on _javascript_ object literal syntax, eval(), and the utter need for compact _javascript_ code in early-2000 web pages.