James Clark has a great post on XML and JSON. But I have one point to pick at.
"JSON's primitive datatype support is weak."
First, the number issue. If you assume JSON datatypes map into JavaScript ones, I believe the JavaScript number type does in fact have a very specific representation. I believe, a 64 bit floating point number. Even for integers. I'd love to point to a reference for this, but I don't have one handy, and the one at mozdev is insufficient.
Note that outside of JavaScript, for languages that treat integers and floating point as separate types, a parser can obviously distinguish between integers and floating points and 'do the right thing' in terms of mapping the JSON value into the appropriate type.
Next, "the set of primitive datatypes is not extensible". But this is true for XML itself. Until you mix in XML schema. It's schema that allows you to interpret a string in XML as some sort of other data type. JSON has no standard schema. Yet. It's easy to imagine though. Defined in JSON, of course.
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