With increasing use of separate services on the same data, the need for portable data formats aroused. XML was one of the first widely used, but lately JSON is blooming.

I don’t have a particular bias here, both serve well in appropriate environment, although JSON carrying the same data could result in about 20% size reduction.

So can they be interchangeable? Just recently, I needed to convert XML data into a JSON format for easier consumption on the client.

The fastest and (sometimes) easiest way to process XML to another format is XSLT.