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The lost art of XML

marcosmagueta.com

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Re: The lost art of XML

#2

Post by shadowgovt »

XML was abandoned because we realized bandwidth costs money and while it was too late to do anything about how verbose HTML is, we didn't have to repeat the mistake with our data transfer protocols.

Even with zipped payloads, it's just way unnecessarily chatty without being more readable.

Re: The lost art of XML

#3

Post by _heimdall »

This is a debate I've had many times. XML, and REST, are extremely useful for certain types of use cases that you quite often run into online.

The industry abandoned both in favor of JSON and RPC for speed and perceived DX improvements, and because for a period of time everyone was in fact building only against their own servers.

There are plenty of examples over the last two decades of us having to reinvent solutions to the same problems that REST solved way back then though. MCP is the latest iteration of trying to shoehorn schemas and self-documenting APIs into a sea of JSON RPC.

Re: The lost art of XML

#4

Post by striking »

I tried using XML on a lark the other day and realized that XSDs are actually somewhat load bearing. It's difficult to map data in XML to objects in your favorite programming language without the schema being known beforehand as lists of a single element are hard to distinguish from just a property of the overall object.

Maybe this is okay if you know your schema beforehand and are willing to write an XSD. My usecase relied on not knowing the schema. Despite my excitement to use a SAX-style parser, I tucked my tail between my legs and switched back to JSONL. Was I missing something?

Re: The lost art of XML

#5

Post by _heimdall »

shadowgovt wrote: post #2

XML was abandoned because we realized bandwidth costs money and while it was too late to do anything about how verbose HTML is, we didn't have to repeat the mistake with our data transfer protocols. Even with zipped payloads, it's just way unnecessarily chatty without being more readable.

That doesn't match my memory, though its been a while now!

I remember the arguments largely revolving around verbosity and the prevalence of JSON use in browsers.

That doesn't mean bandwidth wasn't a consideration, but I mostly remember hearing devs complain about how verbose or difficult to work with XML was.

Re: The lost art of XML

#8

Post by voidfunc »

shadowgovt wrote: post #2

XML was abandoned because we realized bandwidth costs money and while it was too late to do anything about how verbose HTML is, we didn't have to repeat the mistake with our data transfer protocols. Even with zipped payloads, it's just way unnecessarily chatty without being more readable.

OK, but XML is a pretty solid format for a lot of other stuff that doesn't necessarily need network transmission.

Re: The lost art of XML

#10

Post by mkozlows »

This is performance art, right? The very first bullet point it starts with is extolling the merits of XSD. Even back in the day when XML was huge, XSD was widely recognized as a monstrosity and a boondoggle -- the real XMLheads were trying to make RELAX NG happen, but XSD got jammed through because it was needed for all those monstrous WS-* specs.

XML did some good things for its day, but no, we abandoned it for very good reasons.

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