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Stephan Schmidt: "Then our converter cannot detect that items is a list"

Right. XML is "looser" - it doesn't constrain child elements by design ahead of time (as long as you have the right processing rules). With JSON you have to know whether something is a sequence or not, upfront. Whether this extra coupling matters or not, I'm not sure - JSON isn't just a fat free alternative, it's an optimisation. One outcome is that JSON is never going to replace markup as a documentation format - its sweet spot is for sending down database results from servers.

That XML is (shock) well thought out was even a surprise to Lisp people, once - try catching missing end tag errors with sexprs sometime.