Why would anyone choose to use XML over JSON, other than for RSS?
For one, JSON didn't exist 15 years ago.
For another, JSON didn't have validation or schemas 5 years ago.
How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
11–20 of 255 posts
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#12The author of this post is a bozo, doing any (or not doing any) of the suggested things does not guarantee well formed XML. Disregarding whole sections of the XML spec, prescribing a certain way to generate xml are more harmful than not. Can text templates generate well formed xml, absolutely. Can tools generate non-well formed xml, absolutely.
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#13Back in the early days of XML, Internet Explorer would insert "+" characters to fold nested sections of XML. And was the default program to open .xml files. Guess what showed up in the documents I got from an integration partner?
It still does! and I get corrupted files like that mailed to weekly by integration partners. I may be wrong but I think FF also adds some crap to xml files when used as a viewer. I actually like xml, for some reason the structure of it makes alot of sense to me, while json is untidy and confusing
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#14> Don’t print
> Use an isolated serializer
Some old reference material (XML isn't as common as JSON anymore), but still worthwhile learning: don't output data formats directly. Directly = echo, print, printf,println...whatever your syntax suggests. I see this happen a lot with my junior engineers, and I have this same conversation with them.
Prefer to use data serializers that encapsulate all the syntactical rules that go along with XML, CSV, JSON, YAML, etc. Let the serializers do the grunt work of writing output in correct format.
Some serializers aren't always ideal - correctness and speed can be an issue. Nonetheless, prefer to use those mechanisms over writing your own output.
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#15(2005)
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#16Why would anyone choose to use XML over JSON, other than for RSS?
Because its prefered or reqired by a well paying customer. With any sane web framework you get both JSON and XML out of the box. If the well paying customer doesnt send an XML Accept header you make it the default respose type and tell everyone else to send a JSON Accept header. If theres a conflict between multiple well paying customers, you make new end points.
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#17Why would anyone choose to use XML over JSON, other than for RSS?
I'll add some more reasons to the flamebait:
- JSON doesn't have namespaces, making integration of different data-sources quite hard.
- XML allows me to do versioning within documents.
- An extremely large corpus of well-tested libraries are available.
- As opposed to JSON, XML and accompanying standards (XSLT, XML Schema, XPath, XQuery) are extremely well documented.
- XML validation, parsing and processing can happen at the same time, allowing streaming solutions. Using the XML schema, a parser can be created which is optimized for a specific stream of data.
(edit: formatting)
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#18XML is well regarded in the enterprise and languages like JAVA, C#, and VB.NET handle is spectacularly as an exchange format.
I think it's bad reputation comes from anyone not using an enterprise language because the support just isn't there.
I recall working with a partner who we were doing an identity federation with. Our system was using WS-Trust which is a SOAP/XML protocol. It wasn't ideal but everyone seemed to support it ok. These guys were cutting edge though and used Ruby on Rails.
No support for the protocol wasn't a huge deal, just means you have to craft your XML for your SOAP calls yourself. But at the time we were doing this, RoR didn't have SOAP or XML libraries. They had to write everything from the ground up. It sucked for me and I was just fielding rudimentary questions, I can't imagine how painful it must have been for them.
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#19> Don’t print > Use an isolated serializer Some old reference material (XML isn't as common as JSON anymore), but still worthwhile learning: don't output data formats directly. Directly = echo, print, printf,println...whatever your syntax suggests. I see this happen a lot with my junior engineers, and I have this same conversation with them. Prefer to use data serializers that encapsulate all the syntactical rules th…
It's a classic trap that appears to get software developers caught (even now in 2016!) at that point where you are still lacking that firm grasp of the standard libraries available to you.
Re: How to Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML (2005)
#20Had to post this old article because I encountered some bozo code again. Reading more about some CMS and planning on using it for my blogs when I saw the code of the RSS feed. It was written by the lead developer of the CMS and used text templates.
The way your comment comes across is a bit irritating. Not understanding the underlying codebase and classifying based on an attenuated knowledge of a topic promotes one to the 'bozo' status more quickly than not. Many systems use text-template based feeds, examples are Shopify, Salesforce, Wordpress, and more. Are these systems fundamentally broken purely because of this approach? Probably not. In your case, are the text templates escaping their values when outputting? Are they validating for correct XML once generated? Have more questions than having pre-defined answers.