JSON is more applicable to web based applications. With CW and pilot information advertised as being made available in the future this makes it more practicable for that more dynamic data to be associated with player unit web tools.
Appropriate parsing techniques can be applied to both XML and JSON data of course with web tools and I would not be opposed to the provision of both but that is not my call to make. But web based applications have been made more readily compatible to use the JSON format in how it interprets and places them conveniently into arrays for use which might have a bearing also on overall performance with player applications than say applying various XML file reads/interpretations.
The idea of file use in a singular pass to relevant data models and placed into an array for use is then more readily applied in JSON whereas with XML it could be perhaps tempting to apply lots of singular commands to read the hosted XML data using variable/id calls than opposed to the more preferable reading files in one go for interpretation. This would perhaps cause more of a traffic issue then also for PGI's hosting services.
JSON is however less of an overhead due to its formating but I have no reference if that would be an issue. I suspect not however especially when comparatively XML short tag format would potentially be of a similar order of size.
Edited by Noesis, 01 November 2014 - 01:15 PM.