XML Tools and Converters

XML is more expressive than JSON in ways that matter for documents: it distinguishes attributes from child elements, supports namespaces so two vocabularies can coexist in one file, preserves the order of mixed text and elements, and has mature schema languages for validation.

That expressiveness makes conversion to JSON genuinely lossy rather than merely verbose. JSON has no notion of an attribute, so attributes must be encoded as ordinary keys with a prefix. It has no namespaces, so prefixes become part of the key name. And mixed content, text interleaved with child elements, cannot be represented at all, because JSON object keys have no position relative to text.

XML also carries real security weight. A document can define entities that reference external files or URLs, or that expand exponentially. Any XML parser handling untrusted input must refuse to resolve external entities and cap expansion, or parsing a hostile document becomes a file read.