What's coming in glibc 2.10: XML

JSON was designed to be a pure subset of Javascript so they could
market it for web development as a way to send data out to your
client-side JS by simply serializing JSON objects into <script>
tags in the webpage. That's the only reason for the focus on
Javascript -- not to rely on the ECMAScript standard. In fact the
only reference to ECMAScript is informational:

"JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a text format for the
serialization of structured data. It is derived from the object
literals of JavaScript, as defined in the ECMAScript Programming
Language Standard, Third Edition [ECMA]."

The standard is so small because it only has six data
types ('object' (essentially associative array), list, number,
boolean, string, and 'null'). It has no ability to do node
attributes and is only tree-based to the extent that objects and
arrays can contain more of them. It is certianly not a rival to
XML for dealing with large scale or very complicated or nuanced
data. But it is an excellent alternative when you have small
amounts of structured data that you wish to serialize.

Another advantage of JSON is that if you have simple mostly
tabular datasets they can be serialized (with judicious use of
whitespace) in a manner that's both machine and
human-readable. For fun and as an example I decided to 'encode'
my /proc/cpuinfo in JSON:

[{
processor : 0,
vendor_id : "GenuineIntel",
cpu_family : "6",
model : "8",
model_name : "Pentium III (Coppermine)",
stepping : 1,
cpu_MHz : 498.283,
cache_size : [ 262144, "256 KB" ],
fdiv_bug : false,
hlt_bug : false,
f00f_bug : false,
coma_bug : false,
fpu : true,
fpu_exception : true,
cpuid_level : 2,
wp : true,
flags : [ "fpu", "vme", "de", "pse", "tsc", "msr", "pae", "mce", "cx8",
"sep", "mtrr", "pge", "mca", "cmov", "pat", "pse36", "mmx", "fxsr", "sse", "up" ],
bogomips : 997.69,
clflush_size : 32
}]