JSON has its uses. When you want to be super flexible, improvisational, or just loosey-goosey, JSON shines. When you want to adhere to a spec, XML is more trustworthy.

What makes you say that? JSON has schemas (admittedly not part of the original spec, but they do exist and are used). Also, JSON at least supports typed data. When I read a JSON file I know the types of:

{"foo": true, "bar": 10, "baz": "hello"} In XML that information is lost unless you provide it as additional information within the XML itself - like a schema. This provided added work for whoever is reading the data to either “just know”, know there’s a schema (like JSON schemas), or attempt parsing of every attribute/inner text.

Both allow for missing or incomplete data. Neither allows for malformed data (e.g. HTML).