"I've been hearing, off in the distance, about something called JSON, that proposes to solve a problem that was neatly solved by XML-RPC in 1998, the encoding of arrays and structs in a format that could easily be processed by all programming languages. The advantage being that you could easily support the protocol in any language that supported XML and HTTP, which, at the time, was quickly becoming all languages."
http://scripting.com/2006/12/20.html
Then there was someone, much younger than Dave Winer, who wrote a response to this (during 2006), and who said (paraphrase) "When I'm older, I look forward to my XML moment; my horror at something that the young kids are doing."
I wish I could find that second quote, but I worry it is lost in the mists of time.