How would I express XML tag attributes in JSON?

Question

I am designing an API for my webapp.

I was thinking to support only JSON responses (not XML) because more streamlined.

But I have just bumped to this XML:

Answer 1

It seems to me that the most exact correspondence between XML and JSON would need to represent an XML node as a triplet (i.e. array): [name, attributes, value], with name being a string, attributes an object with attribute names as keys and attribute values as (string) values, and value a string (for atomic values) or an array of such triplets.

By such mapping the JSON-equivalent of

    Shopping

would be

[  "folders",
   {}, 
   [
      [  "folder", 
         {   "id": "123",
             "private": "0",
             "archived": "0",
             "order": "1"
         },
         "Shopping"
      ]
   ]
]

Actually the idea behind this mapping is that:

1) XML-JSON transformation be reversible. 2) The "sibling" relationship of sub-nodes be preserved

At the same time the distinction between attribute nodes and value nodes is explicit here.

Does it make sense? And does it justify the complexity overhead?