Aaron Hillel Swartz

“ It’s hard to imagine, for example, building particularly useful tools that work across different JSON APIs, the way web browsers work across all different kinds of HTML pages. Each JSON API has its own internal representations and conventions and protocols, which means you need to write special code to deal with each different one.
That’s where RDF comes in. The idea behind it is simple: what if we had a format that did to data what HTML did to documents—provide a single, consistent representation for them that supports the hypertextual nature of the Web. ”

“ So aside from being simpler, easier, more featureful, safer, and faster than XML, what does JSON have to offer? Well, it has one killer feature that’s guaranteed its place atop the format wars: because it’s based on JavaScript, it has a deep compatibility with web browsers.
You’ve probably heard about AJAX, a technique that uses the XmlHttpRequest function in modern web browsers to allow web pages to initiate their own HTTP requests to get more data. But, for security reasons, XmlHttpRequest is only permitted to request pages on the same domain as the web page it initiates from. ”

“ For APIs, this is kind of a disaster—the whole point of opening up your data on the web is so that other sites can use it. If you’re the only people who can access it, why go to the trouble?
Luckily, there’s one exception: JavaScript. A webpage can embed an HTML ‘