What are good alternative data formats to XML? [closed]
Jeff's article on The Angle Bracket Tax summarizes a number of alternatives (well, mainly YAML), and led me to the wiki article on lightweight markup languages.
Update: Although YAML is a possible "alternative to XML" for some applications, the two are not, as I first thought, isomorphic.
Indeed, it "ain't markup language."
Furthermore, YAML ain't as "lightweight" as it appears. For documents that can be represented in plain XML (such as Jeff's example), YAML is clearly less verbose. But YAML offers many other specialized structures, enlisting many more characters and sequences than are reserved by XML.
Bottom line, if you're looking for XML-without-angle-brackets, YAML ain't it.
Don't forget about YAML!
JSON seems to have better support though. For example, the Prototype JS library has excellent built-in JSON functions.