• Terse.
Xᴇɴᴏɴ is as terse as ᴊꜱᴏɴ using 3 characters per scalar value <key=value> rather than ”key”:value, (4) or ”key”:”value”, (6). Xᴇɴᴏɴ is significantly more terse than xᴍʟ <key>value</key> (5+len(key)) around 10.
• Readable multiple line indented text.
ᴊꜱᴏɴ does not support multiple line text, forcing one to escape newlines as ‘\n‘. xᴍʟ looks messy with multiline line text as the text is copied verbatim, indenting is therefore from the left of the page. Xᴇɴᴏɴ allows one to indent text more than the enclosing markup.
Native support for arrays
Awkward in xᴍʟ.
• Native support for a graph structure, elements may have multiple parents.
Both missing from ᴊꜱᴏɴ and xᴍʟ where special fields are layers on top of the markup.
• Native support for a types used in serialization.
Also missing from ᴊꜱᴏɴ and xᴍʟ.
• Unambiguous choice of data structure.
No attributes.
• Efficient to write by hand.
see Terse. Also supports comments unlike ᴊꜱᴏɴ.
• Can be implemented to be blazingly fast or using a mode-less tokenizer.
Design decisions took performance and grammar simplicity into account.
• The xenon document is named.
Useful. One can see that the document is a <Person> or <Example-Document>
The new Xenon Design Rationale shows how Xenon is the best data description language.