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Yes but in XML we view things as trees, not sets, tuples, or the likes. If you consider stuff as trees, there is not anti-pattern and the example is not wrong, it is correct. It is easy. Maybe we can be a little bit dissatisfied with the choice of attributes vs elements. Of course JSON and its small spec is easier than XML and its bunch of complex recommendations.

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I think it's more appropriate to say XML is about a grammar description of some information serialization. Whereas JSON starts from concepts such as maps which are higher-level data structures. Also, SGML/XML originally isn't so much about trees as about regular tree languages - where the sequence of elements appearing below a node must satisfy a content model given by a regular expression.

Yes, you are right. So the question is which model is better: a tree model (with nodes as flat tuples) or JSON model with nodes being either collections or combinations (with arbitrary nesting). It seems that JSON is more general while XML requires you to map the reality into a tree representation. It is somewhat similar to the relationship between the hierarchical data model and the relational data model.

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