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You probably misunderstand XML

lemire.me

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Re: You probably misunderstand XML

#5

Post by dgreensp »

Thumbs down.

He taught an entire course on XML, which he calls a "great meta-example on how to deal with semi-structured data"? And his only defense of XML over JSON is... it's worked ok for some file formats?

The only point in this whole article is that XML is not well-suited for RPCs, though he fails to argue that it's well-suited for anything else.

One argument is that XML is better than JSON for use cases like XHTML, where you heavily mix tags and content. I get the feeling XML wasn't really made for this case, though, it was made for the JSON-like case. Processing XHTML with E4X (the "XML for JavaScript" standard) is painful, and XML libraries in general assume your document basically consists of a tree of tags, maybe with text nodes at the leaves.

I was expecting some argument invoking the power of DTDs and XSLT or whatever else, or the original point of XML that people overlook, and all I got was an extremely weak defense of XML from someone who taught a whole course on it.

Re: You probably misunderstand XML

#6

Post by RiderOfGiraffes »

msbmsb wrote: post #4
unwind wrote: post #2

Dupe, and not very old at that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1916489 .

I looked for a prior submission before posting - search and browse. Somehow I missed it.

http://searchyc.com/submissions/xml?sort=by_date

First result.

Re: You probably misunderstand XML

#8

Post by 9ec4c12949a4f3 »

dgreensp wrote: post #5

Thumbs down. He taught an entire course on XML, which he calls a "great meta-example on how to deal with semi-structured data"? And his only defense of XML over JSON is... it's worked ok for some file formats? The only point in this whole article is that XML is not well-suited for RPCs, though he fails to argue that it's well-suited for anything else. One argument is that XML is better than JSON for use cases like XH…

> I was expecting some argument invoking the power of DTDs and XSLT or whatever else, or the original point of XML that people overlook, and all I got was an extremely weak defense of XML from someone who taught a whole course on it.

This is exactly what I thought. XSL-T is amazing, but under-used because it's such a pain.

Re: You probably misunderstand XML

#9

Post by flogic »

dgreensp wrote: post #5

Thumbs down. He taught an entire course on XML, which he calls a "great meta-example on how to deal with semi-structured data"? And his only defense of XML over JSON is... it's worked ok for some file formats? The only point in this whole article is that XML is not well-suited for RPCs, though he fails to argue that it's well-suited for anything else. One argument is that XML is better than JSON for use cases like XH…

The only good point for XML is there are existing tools that do things via XML. There are tools that generate ATOM and RSS for you. And there are tools that consume ATOM and RSS. So if XML is already a well defined and followed standard for what you want do, use XML. In all other situations use something else.
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