51–60 of 71 posts
It was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.
It's just that they both fell out of fashion when social media decided they prefer to keep their users captive than accepting interop.
So many words to choose and they had to choose one that already has been used before. Why are techies so devoid of imagination?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is this the hyperscalers fault? YouTube had atom feeds and I don't think Amazon and Microsoft have relevant syndication. Meta is surely responsible but that's it, imo.
Google on several occasions took moves to make the web less semantic. They dumped microformats and standards in favor of soupy error tolerant formats that benefitted their search engine and made it harder for other efforts to make information shareable and accessible. They wanted it to be easy to get information in, but for you to have to go through them to get information out.
I'm not sure they killed microformats, they still support hReview, hProduct etc, don't they?
And they pushed schema.org. I wrote a trivial recipe importing tool that just works™ on a bunch of website because it uses the JSON-LD Recipe schema. It's ~100 lines and a ton simpler than what I had to write 15 years ago.
Sure, they pushed for HTML5-style stuff, but that's not much of killing things.
IMO it's not google that stopped microformats: it's that website owners realized most of the time it was advantaging third parties for no advantage to them.
https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/commit/8ca2fd4e5a520158...>
IIRC, Aaron Swartz was one of the contributors to the format. RIP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation. Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
Thanks, that's interesting to know. Given that we have json schema now though, what reason would someone use XML over Json now?
But, I would suspect, proponents of XML would still point to it's deeper typing system, document structure (especially the hierarchical features of it), and extremely mature ecosystem + tooling (such as XSLTs) as reasons to prefer it over JSON w/ JSON Schema.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main benefit of XML over JSON is that it is structured, and can be associated with Schema's for built in validation. Obviously, that's only a benefit if you care about and utilize those features; most teams doing JSON integrations will just build those into the consumer in lieu of them being provided by the transport. But it is something that some people (especially larger enterprise organizations) value.
JSON is structured (not plain text to be analyzed by an IA). JSON has JSON Schema. In addition, JSON is easier to parse and to map to common data structures of programming languages.
JSON is not, it is closer to the PHP, JS, etc "object" type, which is an ephemeral object with arbitrary member associations.
And, to be clear, this is not a value judgement. They just excel in different fields. XML tends to be easier for strongly and strictly typed languages such as C/C++, C#, Java, etc where you can use the schema to generate your structs automatically. Vanilla JSON is easier for higher level languages that don't require you to manually create a mapping/validation level. JSON Schema tries to bridge that gap to a degree, but isn't built into the standard and isn't even universal.
But, ultimately, both are perfectly sufficient for either use case. It just depends on how much massaging you want to do to make them work.
It was an alternative to RSS from 20 years ago that didn't catch on.
It did catch on, pretty much everything that supported RSS also supported Atom. It's just that they both fell out of fashion when social media decided they prefer to keep their users captive than accepting interop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh. Big tech didnt kill it off, it was already dead at that point. Sometimes things just arent popular no matter how much we might want it to be.
Google Reader was uber popular at a time, then Google decided that syndication of articles, with comments, had to be an exclusive feature of their Facebook-esque Google+.