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In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML

jimpravetz.com

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Re: In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML

#2

Post by jimfuller »

XML, being in the markup family tree, has a lot more history then simple json encoding ... measuring its usefulness on a corner case has always been well ... boring. I am glad people are using JSON to sling simple data across the web versus markup.

Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document ... you might look at XML a bit differently.

tl;dr use the right tool for the right job.

Re: In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML

#3

Post by billysilly »

jimfuller wrote: post #2

XML, being in the markup family tree, has a lot more history then simple json encoding ... measuring its usefulness on a corner case has always been well ... boring. I am glad people are using JSON to sling simple data across the web versus markup. Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document ... you might look at XML a bit differently. tl;dr use the right tool for the right job.

"Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document"

How is that relevant to the article, which is about COS? In other words, what does COS lack what XML has?

Re: In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML

#6

Post by jimfuller »

billysilly wrote: post #3
jimfuller wrote: post #2

XML, being in the markup family tree, has a lot more history then simple json encoding ... measuring its usefulness on a corner case has always been well ... boring. I am glad people are using JSON to sling simple data across the web versus markup. Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document ... you might look at XML a bit differently. tl;dr use the right tool for the right job.

"Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document" How is that relevant to the article, which is about COS? In other words, what does COS lack what XML has?

I could just as similarly ask why the author even mentions XML ?

Re: In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML

#7

Post by patrickg »

billysilly wrote: post #3
jimfuller wrote: post #2

XML, being in the markup family tree, has a lot more history then simple json encoding ... measuring its usefulness on a corner case has always been well ... boring. I am glad people are using JSON to sling simple data across the web versus markup. Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document ... you might look at XML a bit differently. tl;dr use the right tool for the right job.

"Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document" How is that relevant to the article, which is about COS? In other words, what does COS lack what XML has?

* Infrastructure (schema support - DTD, Schema, RelaxNG; transformation - XSLT) * No obvious document format (What encoding are the strings? How to escape characters? * Only used to describe predefined object types (boolean, strings, arrays, dictionaries * Hard to ensure the integrity of the data without interpreting the data from the interpreter itself (no external validation)

Re: In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML

#9

Post by georgemcbay »

armored_mammal wrote: post #5

And here I thought everyone hated XML...

I don't hate XML, I just think it tends to be misused.

I (still) think XML is fine for configuration files and things like markup of UI/UX components (See: Flex, WPF, Android layouts, etc). In this context, where you may be modelling the relationship between many parents with many children nested fairly deeply, I find XML much more readable and easy to edit and reason about than JSON.

Where XML makes little sense is as an over-the-wire network protocol format or in any context where its "human readable"/"human editable" properties aren't as important. In those contexts, I think JSON is far better suited though neither is completely ideal.

Re: In Defense of COS, or Why I Love JSON and Hate XML

#10

Post by joe_the_user »

jimfuller wrote: post #2

XML, being in the markup family tree, has a lot more history then simple json encoding ... measuring its usefulness on a corner case has always been well ... boring. I am glad people are using JSON to sling simple data across the web versus markup. Come back to me when you are using json to encode an entire document ... you might look at XML a bit differently. tl;dr use the right tool for the right job.

Yes,

But I would claim that by being designed for many jobs in a sloppy way, XML became a terrible tool for all jobs.

Json is a good replacement for XML in some of the application for which some folks foolishly targeted XML (I worked on a server back in the day that really did process five times the data 'cause of our use of XML for interchange - as was the new standard at the time, remember "XML everywhere!"?).

Html is a good tool for web documents (who would have thought?) but you're right, XML fills in for a lot of other document uses - XML is so far the best generalization that splits the difference between a word document and an HTML file. But I suspect the celebrate if someone could put forward a better such generalization because even in the realms where XML is the best tool available, it is a bad tool.

Perhaps if more people admitted the awful attribute/value ambiguity problem that the article very intelligently calls-out, the use of XML would be less painful. If we called it "Inconsistently Structured Data Intermingling Format" ISDIF, the young developers would have some idea what they were getting into.

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