Simon Willison condenses the case for JSON in an explanation I could have used a year ago.

The sweet spot for JSON is serializing simple data structures for transfer between programming languages. If you need more complex data structures (maybe with some kind of schema for validation), use XML. If you want to do full blown RPC use SOAP or XML-RPC. If you just want a light-weight format for moving data around, JSON fits the bill admirably.

Back then, I could only glean that people were sick of XML and it was cool you could just eval() it in the browser.

This is what Jeff Atwood means when he says that programming isn't the most important thing that a programmer can do.

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