I’ve hated XML since 2004. The worst part about it is the tags vs attributes fights. They both do the same thing and the only difference is preference. Having two ways of doing the same thing invite and incite religious positions and cause unnecessary fighting. There should be one, opinionated way of doing things so you avoid confusion.
Do you hate XML? (2010)
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Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#12In 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.
Agreed. Among text based formats, nothing I hate more than YAML.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#13Every 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 real…
I don't like HTML5 and to this day I don't understand what was actually gained by dropping XHTML.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#14I’ve hated XML since 2004. The worst part about it is the tags vs attributes fights. They both do the same thing and the only difference is preference. Having two ways of doing the same thing invite and incite religious positions and cause unnecessary fighting. There should be one, opinionated way of doing things so you avoid confusion.
yeah it's not a good design to have tags have two sets of children: a Set of key-value children and then a List of tree object children.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#15XML is unfairly maligned. Yes, people bought into it too much 26 years ago, but then you would too if you had to maintain someone else's massive packed struct dumped into a file and documented in a poorly-maintained word document --- or worse, a brace of dumb IETF RFCs that contradict eachother.
I am glad that younger generations are looking at it with fresh eyes. XML is a useful format; it has its place in your toolbox. Ignore the haters.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#16At 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.
1. What, in your view, are the right reasons to hate XML?
2. To me, verbosity and aesthetics seem like perfectly valid reasons to hate XML. Once you learn S expressions, XML looks disgusting. They implemented half of Common Lisp in a markup language.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#17I’ve hated XML since 2004. The worst part about it is the tags vs attributes fights. They both do the same thing and the only difference is preference. Having two ways of doing the same thing invite and incite religious positions and cause unnecessary fighting. There should be one, opinionated way of doing things so you avoid confusion.
> The worst part about it is the tags vs attributes fights. They both do the same thing and the only difference is preference.
They're not the same thing. If you look at it as the extensible markup language for documents that it is, "tags" (i.e. inner content) would be visible and "attributes" would not. If your XML document was processed by an application to convert to another type of document (PDF, etc.), and it didn't recognize a particular tag, it would be sensible for attributes to disappear, but inner content ("tags") to remain.
It's only seems like a preference thing if you look at XML as a structured data format like JSON is.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#18In 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…
Not really. In C# I use a parsing library for which I just write a class and then the library automatically serializes the JSON into an instance of that class.
I can do the same thing with XML. Of course it doesn't necessarily go that smoothly with all xml, but as long as the xml is fairly simple like a JSON document would be it's totally fine. It's only when you start to use all the features of xml that don't fit neatly into a class model that it starts to get annoying. But if JSON serves your needs then simple xml does as well. I wouldn't use it because JSON works just fine but it's not as bad as people make it seem, unless people make it really bad.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#19In 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…
Because SAX parsing is a thing, and the visitor pattern makes it easy to elide searches in sub-trees if an attribute does not match.
So if name == "foobar" then read; else ignore. For a 500 GiB XML file that makes a difference.
As for your other point about an "AST" (it's actually just a DOM.) That's the the benefit? And you're in for a surprise when you learn that reaching into a deeply-nested JSON structure deserialised into whatever memory format most appropriate for your pet language is also an abstract data type that you act on with getters/accessors/what-have-yous that is in all but name a DOM.
And we do have tools to deal with it: XSLT for transformation. For querying? XPath.
Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)
#20Every 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 real…
I don't like HTML5 and to this day I don't understand what was actually gained by dropping XHTML.
Not having the page break because of a small mistake. Though I did get pretty good at writing XHTML, and strictness is a blessing in certain cases.