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XML is the future

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Re: XML is the future

#101

Post by noduerme »

throw310822 wrote: post #94
Pamar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This too. If the foundation is solid, it's easy to shift the outputs.

Re: XML is the future

#102

Post by rekado »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #88

XML is very much misunderstood. The hype that surrounded it was for a good reason, because XML is somewhat unique as a concept. There was nothing like it and still isn’t. It is not a data format or something like that. It is a notation tool. Normally you invent some syntax and parse it to get what is called “abstract syntax tree” (AST). With XML you work directly with an AST. Parsing from text is convenient because y…

> Normally you invent some syntax and parse it to get what is called “abstract syntax tree” (AST). With XML you work directly with an AST.

This is also why the Scheme syntax for XML, SXML, feels right at home in the land of S-expressions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SXML

Re: XML is the future

#103

Post by noduerme »

Kwpolska wrote: post #91
pyeri wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd never heard it described as using HTML tags as rvalues but that just makes it sound so much worse.

Re: XML is the future

#104

Post by tannhaeuser »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #88

XML is very much misunderstood. The hype that surrounded it was for a good reason, because XML is somewhat unique as a concept. There was nothing like it and still isn’t. It is not a data format or something like that. It is a notation tool. Normally you invent some syntax and parse it to get what is called “abstract syntax tree” (AST). With XML you work directly with an AST. Parsing from text is convenient because y…

> XML is somewhat unique as a concept. There was nothing like it and still isn’t.

That's just incorrect. XML is a proper SGML subset, nothing more. Why do intelligent people like you come here to lecture about markup languages but don't even bother to read the XML specification which clearly states (as in chapter 1, sentence 1):

> The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML.

Re: XML is the future

#105

Post by Ygg2 »

baq wrote: post #51
preommr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JSX - stands for Javascript XML. React components can be referenced as custom tags in a markup that's an extension of html - pretty much xml.

Yes. It won because the name starts with JS and I’m only half joking. What I desperately need now is JSML so I can free myself from the madness of YAML.

As someone working on Yaml parser. I fully understand that pain.

Re: XML is the future

#106

Post by madsbuch »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #88

XML is very much misunderstood. The hype that surrounded it was for a good reason, because XML is somewhat unique as a concept. There was nothing like it and still isn’t. It is not a data format or something like that. It is a notation tool. Normally you invent some syntax and parse it to get what is called “abstract syntax tree” (AST). With XML you work directly with an AST. Parsing from text is convenient because y…

You could say the same about JSON. It is arguably closer to how and AST is represented in software as it does not posses the two dimensional notation like XML does.

The unique thing about XML is that you can both have children and attributes. My guess it that this is to model OOP-based systems: Attributes are for the constructor or a certain class while the children represent dependency injections.

This is IMHO the weak point for XML: It gives too many levers. when we don't know how to assign meaning the the levers, we arrive at garbage like the example from another comment: 123

Re: XML is the future

#107

Post by espe »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #88

XML is very much misunderstood. The hype that surrounded it was for a good reason, because XML is somewhat unique as a concept. There was nothing like it and still isn’t. It is not a data format or something like that. It is a notation tool. Normally you invent some syntax and parse it to get what is called “abstract syntax tree” (AST). With XML you work directly with an AST. Parsing from text is convenient because y…

mostly agree. not only a notation tool though - you can see some familiarity to scheme, that data is also an actionable description, and literate programming, that this actionable description is also a human readable description. together with its tooling XML still has its very own space. XSLT feels quite elegant once you get the hang of it.

Re: XML is the future

#108

Post by isoprophlex »

chunkyks wrote: post #33

Time to link grug brain again! https://grugbrain.dev/

Thanks to chatGPT there's an infinite supply of Grug wisdom on this specific topic:

Grug see tribe use XML for talk between cave wall. But XML talk too loud. XML say Hello. Why not just say Hello? JSON talk quiet. JSON just say "message": "Hello". Grug like quiet talk.

Grug also see XML not consistent. Sometimes XML use attribute, sometimes use element. Make Grug confused. JSON always use key-value. Grug like consistency.

Grug think XML like big, heavy rock. Hard to carry, hard to use. JSON like small, sharp tool. Easy to carry, easy to use. Grug choose JSON.

Re: XML is the future

#109

Post by mythhabit »

devjab wrote: post #61

I worked a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, where for some reason they still use a lot of SOAP and thus XML. I’m not so against XML in theory, but I hate it in practice. You’d have these completely over engineered solutions where you’d basically need to call a separate micro services for every “field” of anything. So if you wanted a name, a ssn, and, an address for a citizen you’d need to make sever…

> You’d have these completely over engineered solutions where you’d basically need to call a separate micro services for every “field” of anything. So if you wanted a name, a ssn, and, an address for a citizen you’d need to make several calls.

The official CPR API you can get all of that information with a single call and I think it returns JSON. I'm not sure when that API was released, but I think it was quite a while ago. There is one for companies as well (CVR API, but technically it's just an Elastic Search query iirc).

Re: XML is the future

#110

Post by qayxc »

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote: post #88

XML is very much misunderstood. The hype that surrounded it was for a good reason, because XML is somewhat unique as a concept. There was nothing like it and still isn’t. It is not a data format or something like that. It is a notation tool. Normally you invent some syntax and parse it to get what is called “abstract syntax tree” (AST). With XML you work directly with an AST. Parsing from text is convenient because y…

> So if we are to add something to this article’s sentiment it could be an observation that we are also prone to misunderstanding things and jumping too quickly to conclusions.

I'd add another observation: most of the cynical views expressed in the article are simply the result of "hammer syndrome": hand a person a hammer and everything starts looking like a nail. Overuse of tools and trying to apply them to problems they weren't intended to solve, is a big issue.

Ignoring lessons from the past is another. I love how the author makes it sound as if NodeJS and trying to use the same ecosystem for backend and frontend was something new. "Write Once, Run Everywhere!" was a slogan that predates NodeJS by over a decade :)

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