json in gdata

Google's Blogger, Calendar, and Base now support JSON as output format in addition to that other, ahem, well, its name starts with "X".

I think this is really big news, because JSON should make it easier to interface with services without requiring a client library.

The concrete format is a direct 1:1 mapping from Atom to JSON, which is interesting in its own right:

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "encoding": "UTF-8",
  "feed": {
    "xmlns": "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom",
    "xmlns$openSearch": "http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/",
    "xmlns$gd": "http://schemas.google.com/g/2005",
    "xmlns$gCal": "http://schemas.google.com/gCal/2005",
    "id": {"$t": "..."},
    "updated": {"$t": "2006-11-12T21:25:30.000Z"},
    "title": {
      "type": "text",
      "$t": "Google Developer Events"
    },
    "subtitle": {
      "type": "text",
      "$t": "The calendar contains information about upcoming developer 
       conferences at which Google will be speaking, along with other 
       developer-related events."
    }, ...

Additionally, they have added support for JSONP, which makes it possible to query data across different domains.

So, JSON is mainstream now. Wow! Life's good.