Back at the PDC, I mentioned that Microsoft chose JSON over XML in Atlas, its AJAX framework. The debate has reared its head again recently, prompted largely by Tim Bray's post.
Tim says that JSON is great for its single intended purpose, "to put structs on the wire." Dare, who used to work on the XML team at Microsoft, say JSON is better than XmlHttpRequest because it helps work around browser security model limitations and is easier to program with. The cross-browser issues are a particularly big issue that people have tried to tackle in different ways - I mentioned before that Julien is using a Flash proxy to work around these issues, and I've seen other architectures which use a server-side proxy on the original server to handle the third-party request.
The key here is that AJAX is not about the technology, but the experience. JSON may or may not be the "best" way to approach this, but the exercise at least highlights some of the limitations (and, to be fair, strengths) inherent in the XmlHttpRequest / SOAP model.
