Like most developers working today, I spend about 99% of my life swimming in JSON. It’s just the default language of the modern web. Whether you're building Next.js apps, spinning up Node microservices, or fetching data for mobile apps, everything revolves around clean, readable JSON.
I honestly thought my days of wrestling with angle brackets were long gone. Left behind in the mid-2010s.
Then, a few weeks ago, a new client dropped this bomb in Slack:
"Hey, quick question—can we get this webhook payload sent over as XML instead?"
My first instinct was a slight internal sigh. But as I dug deeper into their infrastructure, it made sense. Turns out, a massive chunk of the enterprise world—especially payment gateways, government APIs, banking systems, and legacy logistics software—still completely relies on XML. It’s the invisible backbone of systems that were built to last decades, and they aren't changing anytime soon.
