Revisited: JSON bigger than XML???

A little over a year ago I stumbled across a Google code sample comparing JSON and XML that caught my eye for a reason completely unrelated to Google's intended subject:  the sample JSON-encoded data was larger than its XML equivalent!  This represented an unlikely exception to the generally-accepted view that JSON is the leaner data format.  Still, I was recently wondering if others have made any serious efforts to point out the fact that XML can be leaner than JSON...