What is JSON and why would I use it?

Question

I\'ve looked on wikipedia and Googled it and read the official documentation, but I still haven\'t got to the point where I really understand what JSON is, and why I\'d use

Answer 1

I like JSON mainly because it's so terse. For web content that can be gzipped, this isn't necessarily a big deal (hence why xhtml is so popular). But there are occasions where this can be beneficial.

For example, for one project I was transmitting information that needed to be serialized and transmitted via XMPP. Since most servers will limit the amount of data you can transmit in a single message, I found it helpful to use JSON over the obvious alternative, XML.

As an added bonus, if you're familiar with Python or Javascript, you already pretty much know JSON and can interpret it without much training at all.