Do you hate XML? (2010)
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Do you hate XML? (2010)
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Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#2In my opinion, the reason people hate XML is because of what M signifies: it is a markup language and most of the time we don’t need a markup language. Markup languages are great for rich text documents. They are just not a good fit for representing data. The markup-nature of XML introduces unnecessary choice in whether to use an attribute or a child element to represent data; for HTML such ambiguity doesn’t actually exist but for data it does. Consider this piece of XML from the Python docs:
1
2008
141100
Furthermore parsing JSON or YAML gives you an AST that consists of the basic data types like lists and dictionaries. Parsing XML gives you an AST that requires a lot more effort to turn into data in your domain. Even on the web, very few people like to use the verbose XML DOM API like childNodes, nodeType, getElementsByTagName et al; it is basically unheard of for anyone to use it outside the web such as in Python, despite that the DOM API is in the Python standard library since forever (see https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.14/Lib/xml/dom/mini... for example).
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#3XML was a good, well-intentioned idea.
The problem, IMHO, was that rampant "xml-abuse" in the naughts. ws-* standards and over-engineered garbage like SOAP ("complex object access protocol") made people loathe XML.
I did like JAXB in Java, XLST, schemas, XPATH. Never got into XSL, but it seemed like good thing too. It worked best when your tooling manipulated it for you or at least helped you in an intelligent way. Much of the hate for XML came from situations where you had to deal with someone's over-the-top-one-size-fits all schema without the benefit of tooling to at least hint you in the right direction.
It still survives in WPF and c# *.proj files. If it were just me, I would still use it for object serialization. But json is king now even though it's inferior.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#4At least XML is hated for the wrong reasons (e.g. verbosity, esthetics) most of the time. There was for sure an era where it was overused (see Apache Cocoon from 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cocoon). But XML is still a pretty good format to exchange (and store) data and make sure the data conforms to a certain schema. JSON Schema in comparison is not nearly as powerful.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#5In my opinion, the reason people hate XML is because of what M signifies: it is a markup language and most of the time we don’t need a markup language. Markup languages are great for rich text documents. They are just not a good fit for representing data. The markup-nature of XML introduces unnecessary choice in whether to use an attribute or a child element to represent data; for HTML such ambiguity doesn’t actually…
YAML made me not hate XML.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#6In my opinion, the reason people hate XML is because of what M signifies: it is a markup language and most of the time we don’t need a markup language. Markup languages are great for rich text documents. They are just not a good fit for representing data. The markup-nature of XML introduces unnecessary choice in whether to use an attribute or a child element to represent data; for HTML such ambiguity doesn’t actually…
Interesting point of view. JSON is also not the right thing to use in many scenarios, but it is the de-facto standard now. Maybe something like protobuf is the way to go.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#7Every time XML comes up, I feel obligated to share my opinion (I too wrote XML a the turn of the millennium and have seen it become and still witness on occasion it being excommunicated).
XML is verbose and therefore uglier than it ought to be. I think most of the haters hate it for that alone -- there's not much else to hate because you don't have to deal with the rest, it's not really imposed on you unless you really have to deal with someone else's XML application.
What do I mean? Well, the brackets thing and the necessity to repeat name of every element twice, in correct (LIFO, last in first out) order, isn't great, admittedly.
What XML has that the dev-bro alternatives that have flooded the void XML left since, haven't gotten and thus see being reinvented, are: namespaces, attributes and interop using the former two. Sure you can write JSON and YAML (the latter deservingly being incredibly hard to parse correctly -- they tried to design a better XML but failed IMO) -- but these suck as meta-languages because there's not much "meta" there. JSON, for example, allows you create properties and has a few types (kind of more than XML, really) but it leaves semantics up to you and namespaces are up to you to re-invent, poorly. If you think I am stretching the argument, see if you can represent an HTML document (no, not Markdown) with a JSON file.
YAML is a similar story, albeit with a few cool things like aliases. I think it's a better attempt to give the world a better XML, but the jury is still out on that one.
The killer thing with XML, for better and for worse, was plethora of tools to work with it. I wrote a fair share of XSLT documents to transform data, back when there was momentum in XHTML, for example. XSLT barely supports JSON and it's not pretty. XPath cannot natively understand YAML -- unless you convert it to XML which I guess re-animates XML as some sort of Frankenstein's monster. And even if it were a [pretty] monster, dealing with intermediate representation for the kind of purpose, is a can of worms all of its own.
Ironically nobody seems to hate HTML 5, seemingly. Or React basically turned it into a greasy cogwheel nobody needs to look at. Because if you look at it, it's in my opinion an abomination even compared to XML (unpopular opinion) -- the parser is quirky and behaviour is defined by the standard per element type (i.e. some elements need a closing tag and some do not, and what happens if you forget a closing tag is element-specific; care to remember the set of rules to ensure your document renders to your liking?). It has no namespaces but it has "custom elements" which require a dash in the name as poor' man's namespaces and you can't omit one, and now we have a Web of `x-spinner` and `x-carousel` because it turns out everyone rightfully wanted default namespace but didn't get one. Anyway, it's all plumbing, right -- the idea of _writing_ HTML has largely come and gone us by. And I am digressing.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#8It will be back like vinyl.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#9> developers must become domain experts [my emphasis] in a rich and complex space that is essentially unrelated to the application itself.
XML is a markup language, but most people that used it just needed a standard structured data format. In comes JSON which is more easily compatible with the object systems of various languages and in particular is compatible with Javascript syntax, and XML loses most of the people that used it.
As a markup language though, it seems pretty good. It's just that the amount of people that actually need an extensible markup language is much smaller.
I do hate the strictness of it. The header
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#10Honestly I miss it. As overengineered as it was, at least we had proper tooling for it, and while there were dialects in the associated tech (e.g. XML Schema vs RELAX NG vs Schematron) it was minor compared to the wild west that JSON is to this day.