Brent Simmons and Manton Reece:
We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs.
So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds.
My inital reaction to this was “But, why?” Then I read the spec, which is really nicely written for us humans, and I realized that JSON really is very prominent in many tech stacks these days. So, why the hell not?
Just for fun, I decided to spend ten minutes to try and implement a JSON Feed of my own for frippz.se (might be full of bugs). Looking around the web now, a lot of people seem excited about this new spec, so why not jump on the bandwagon early this time?