From the course: JSON Essential Training

What is JSON? - JavaScript Tutorial

From the course: JSON Essential Training

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What is JSON?

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- [Instructor] JSON is a popular format used for sharing data online. The name is short for JavaScript Object Notation. JSON syntax is based on the JavaScript language, but you don't need to know JavaScript in order to use JSON. In fact, one of the reasons JSON is so popular is that you can use it in conjunction with most any programming language. JSON is widely used in a variety of common data exchange situations, including API requests and responses, and application configuration files. Before JSON was created, extensible markup language or XML, was a popular choice, but JSON quickly grew to eclipse XML, especially on the web because of a few key advantages. One of JSON's advantages is that it's pretty easy for humans to read. For instance, this is one way to encode basic information about the country of Thailand in JSON and in XML. Both of these structures contain the same information, country name, capital, and area. But XML contains more extraneous characters and repeats the data label in both opening and closing tags. This not only creates a visual clutter that interferes with human readability, but it also increases the number of characters required to encode the same data. Meaning that XML data generally requires more bytes. This is a critical difference online because fewer bytes means a large file can be downloaded more quickly and browsers can display website content faster. Human readability and file size are two of the reasons that JSON has come to dominate data encoding on the web today. And that makes JSON an important syntax to understand for a wide range of roles that work with data. From computer programming to software configuration, to data analytics and reporting.

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