11–20 of 179 posts
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.
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…
First, there is modeling ambiguity, too many ways to represent the same data structure. Which means you can’t parse into native structs but instead into a heavy DOM object and it sucks to interact with it.
Then, schemas sound great, until you run into DTD, XSD, and RelaxNG. Relax only exists because XSD is pretty much incomprehensible.
Then let’s talk about entity escaping and CDATA. And how you break entire parsers because CDATA is a separate incantation on the DOM.
And in practice, XML is always over engineered. It’s the AbstractFactoryProxyBuilder of data formats. SOAP and WSDL are great examples of this, vs looking at a JSON response and simply understanding what it is.
I worked with XML and all the tooling around it for a long time. Zero interest in going back. It’s not the angle brackets or the serialization efficiency. It’s all of the above brain damage.
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.
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…
dsssl was the scheme based domain specific "document style semantics and and specification language"
the syntax change was in the era of general lisp syntax bashing.
but to xml syntax? really? that was so surreal to me.
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.
> This is not engineering. This is fashion masquerading as technical judgment.
The boring explanation is that AI wrote this. The more interesting theory is that folks are beginning to adopt the writing quirks of AI en masse.
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…
XML is extensible markup, i.e. it's like HTML that can be applied to tasks outside of representing web pages. It's designed to be written by hand. It has comments! A good use for XML would be declaring a native UI: it's not HTML but it's like HTML.
JSON is a plain text serialization format. It's designed to be generated and consumed by computers whilst being readable by humans.
Neither is a configuration language but both have been abused as one.
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…
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.