ReadWriteWeb

James Clark, technical lead for the World Wide Web Consortium's XML activity, published a blog post today about the perceived competition between JSON and XML. Twitter and Foursquare both recently dropped support for XML, opting to use JSON exclusively. Clark doesn't see XML going away, but sees it less and less as a Web technology. "I think the Web community has spoken," Clark concludes. "And it's clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON." Clark cites a few particular reasons why JSON is winning the hearts and minds of web developers.

W3C has announced the third version of its standards for the inclusion of mathematical expressions in Web pages. MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) is aimed to make math on the Web more accessible and more international. While the basic markup remains the same, this version brings to it some improvements for assistive technology, as well as for formulas in languages that are written from right to left.

The MathML standard is supported in a number of applications already, beyond just websites - eBooks, equation editors, screen readers, braille displays, and computational software, for example. And it's part of the larger W3C Open Web Platform, which includes HTML5, CSS and SVG.

This year has seen an explosion in the development of mobile augmented reality applications, from games and parlor tricks to incredibly useful applications that provide more information about the world around us.

Today, Austrian smartphone development shop Mobilizy, creator of the Wikitude World Browser, has announced it will be presenting a standard AR markup language (ARML) to the the AR Consortium. Such a step would remove one of the five barriers to AR that we recently wrote about: interoperability. Cross-platform, open development standards would allow users more ways to see more AR content. Read on for a video and details.