Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

XML is the future

bitecode.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 408 posts

Re: XML is the future

#91

Post by Kwpolska »

pyeri wrote: post #55
noduerme wrote: post #16

I really love this review of the past 20 years. It gets to the heart of the hype/FOMO cycle that's driven so many of these stacks to short-lived superstardom, and then quickly into irreversible technical debt. I have never really understood this. My favorite comment I ever got on a coding board when I was debating the pros and cons of building my next project in the trendy platform of the day was >> STFU, go out and…

I wouldn't call XML entirely a hype or FOMO, it has become part of what we call the modern web even today. 1. The very language that websites are written in today (HTML5/XHTML) are nothing but XML dialects. 2. React's JXS language which many sites use today is also an XML dialect. 3. RSS and ATOM standards used to publish your blog or website feeds are XML standards. 4. JSON replaced XML only as an efficient transpor…

I wouldn't call JSX an XML dialect. It's JS with the ability to use HTML tags (or things similar to HTML tags, given the class → className rename) as rvalues. The JSX HTML tags aren't valid XML, e.g. because of braces (). Even if you don't use any attributes, an XML parser won't do anything useful to a JSX document.

Re: XML is the future

#92

Post by RachelF »

dmje wrote: post #86

What a cracking article. I nodded so much my neck hurts. I'm 50 and although by HN standards, not a proper nerd (I'm a ..."web generalist?" - more project manager who can dabble in code than anything ey) and I've seen all this stuff come and go for 30+ years in the web industry. The thing I've always done is stuck to the core trio of technologies: html, CSS and a smattering of JS when you need it. Then it's PHP for s…

Yeah, I've been in this game for 40+ years. Fads come and go. When I started 4GLs were going to take over everything. 10 years later it was SDDs and SDSs, then it was UML and it goes on to what's mentioned in the article.

Perhaps it is the triumph of hope over experience, perhaps those new in the field prefer to use the new tools rather than understand how the old ones work.

I think the quality of software has deteriorated, but then complexity has also gone up. One never writes anything from scratch these days, there's a tower of libraries underneath now.

Re: XML is the future

#93

Post by d--b »

> geeks think they are rational beings, while they are completely influenced by buzz, marketing, and their emotions.

Also geeks are influenced by whatever tool is most convenient. I’ve used XML knowing pretty damn well it was annoyingly verbose. But hey it came with all the tooling: a library to parse it efficiently, auto formatting in my editor (with folding and auto-correcting), all the docs for graduates who didn’t know it. And there was nothing else!

The same is true of : Electron, Pandas, etc.

Sometimes the “best” tool is just the “only” tool…

Re: XML is the future

#94

Post by throw310822 »

Pamar wrote: post #76
noduerme wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've watched this happen to so many coders in the land where people write code for companies that sell code . Personal advice: Write code for any other kind of company. They're much more resistant to fads. They don't care how you accomplish the new feature. They just want to get it done. And they certainly don't want to change their stack, ever , although in a new project you'll have more flexibility to pick the righ…

This is all fine but... the rest of the world is not freezed. Let's say you are happily mantaining a stable, boring ERP app for your... cigarette lighters plant. Out of the blue, one of your main suppliers declares they will accept orders only through a REST interface starting next quarter. And that you can/must use it to track your orders, instead of sending an email to one of their employees. One week later, you ar…

I've worked for a small company that does an old boring ERP. In C. The oldest files in the library date to the late '80s. The whole thing runs on a dime, is super fast, and a few developers could manage the needs of tens of clients.

Implementing orders in REST was probably done in a couple of weeks of work. PDFs have been there since ever.

Re: XML is the future

#95

Post by bawolff »

preommr wrote: post #30

It's easy to just mark XML off as one of the many fads in tech given how many there are. But I think it's much more worthwile to dive into the particulars of why it failed. While they're all fads, some of them share commonalities that, in hindsight, I think we can say were major catylsts to their downfall. With XML, it failed because something like JSON was much simpler. Time and time again I see people saying that j…

> The XML ecosystem with things like XSLT, Xquery,etc, were elegant, but also overengineered and clunk

Hell those were the better XML standards. Just consider SOAP, SAML (XMLSignature is insane), etc

XML just another example that unnecessary complexity is the worst sin in software development

Re: XML is the future

#96

Post by noduerme »

bandrami wrote: post #80
deaddodo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at both, the latter type of company also has it's downsides. Primarily: a) the inverse is also true...you'll be working on some old technology that only your industry utilizes and isn't well optimized for modern use cases or is extremely niche; despite there being plentiful use cases to make the switch, it'll never be "in the budget", b) your payrate is generally going to be quite a bit lower than indus…

I agree that it's dull but the fact that I still know ColdFusion 20 years later gets me a lot of work. No, it's not Silicon Valley money but it is Fairfax County money, which ain't bad.

Having a lifetime gig is worth more than all the startup stock options in the world.

But then again, I like my own yard and sitting by my fire pit with a beer, and I don't spend too much time worrying what other people have.

Re: XML is the future

#98

Post by noduerme »

Pamar wrote: post #76
noduerme wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've watched this happen to so many coders in the land where people write code for companies that sell code . Personal advice: Write code for any other kind of company. They're much more resistant to fads. They don't care how you accomplish the new feature. They just want to get it done. And they certainly don't want to change their stack, ever , although in a new project you'll have more flexibility to pick the righ…

This is all fine but... the rest of the world is not freezed. Let's say you are happily mantaining a stable, boring ERP app for your... cigarette lighters plant. Out of the blue, one of your main suppliers declares they will accept orders only through a REST interface starting next quarter. And that you can/must use it to track your orders, instead of sending an email to one of their employees. One week later, you ar…

Well, I can't tell you how many dozens of times I've had to learn some stupid company's API and integrate it into software just because a client decided to do business with them. That comes with the territory, and you set up whatever you need to make it work. When it happens, it's a sprint, and you migrate everything you need to. But that's very different than migrating it because you're bored or want to sell the client a new shiny thing.

Re: XML is the future

#99

Post by IshKebab »

preommr wrote: post #30

It's easy to just mark XML off as one of the many fads in tech given how many there are. But I think it's much more worthwile to dive into the particulars of why it failed. While they're all fads, some of them share commonalities that, in hindsight, I think we can say were major catylsts to their downfall. With XML, it failed because something like JSON was much simpler. Time and time again I see people saying that j…

I disagree. XML isn't that complex. I think it failed because:

* It's overly verbose. All those closing tags, ugh.

* The data model is not actually what people want most of the time. People are transferring objects, not documents. The fact that XML doesn't have a proper way to represent maps, and you have the redundancy of attributes, inline text, etc... There's a huge mismatch between the data model of XML and the data model that people usually want.

* SAX is obviously a shit way to do parsing. There were DOM parsers and pull parsers but for some reason SAX was stupidly common despite being stupidly awkward.

Re: XML is the future

#100

Post by kitd »

andrewflnr wrote: post #58
hardwaresofton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look I'm not even complaining. But it feels like I'm stuck in a Franz Kafka novel. We just keep changing and changing the same things again and again because that's the new way to do. Big distraction. Destroys your workflow. Forget about all the util scripts you wrote last 6 months being useless. Here's how I stay sane -- I focus on the changes. For the technologies that you noted, here are some good questions that…

I would phrase almost the same idea from the opposite angle: focus on the fundamentals that never change, and view the trends in terms of how they relate to those fundamentals. But also, those are some pretty odd comparisons. For sure Ansible and Terraform aren't directly comparable. If anything they're complementary. Terraform provisions machines (and also infra, etc), and Ansible configures provisioned machines.

Lord, teach me to accept the things I cannot change,

And use version control for the things I can ...

Post reply on HN