Data Interchange Format

XML vs JSON

XML markup uses up more space than the actual payload. JSON has adressed this problem and while it's still a self-describing plain-text format, it's more space-efficient than anything XML-based could ever be.

JSON Translations

JSON	Python
object	dict
array	list
string	unicode
number (int)	int, long
number (real)	float
true	True
false	False
null	None