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Do you hate XML? (2010)

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Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#21

Post by tonyedgecombe »

actionfromafar wrote: post #5
kccqzy wrote: post #2

In 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.

That and all the proprietary formats we had to deal with before XML came along.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#22

Post by trueno »

i dont hate it, the declaration kind of annoys me from time to time digging into attributes can be annoying its obviously not the best form of structured data.

json is just easier for my brain at this point if it needs to go over http, but ive seen some pretty... poorly designed json structures.

csv is always a good time. love when i can just plop important data into a table and query away

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#23

Post by jolmg »

hackrmn wrote: post #7

Every 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…

> Well, the brackets thing and the necessity to repeat name of every element twice,

As a document format, it's supposed to be hand-written by humans. If you have paragraphs between the opening tag and closing tag, it makes sense to let the reader know what they're seeing the closing of.

After deciding you do want to repeat the element name, the angle brackets make more sense. Otherwise, you can have a syntax like LaTeX's.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#24

Post by kccqzy »

int_19h wrote: post #13
hackrmn wrote: post #7

Every 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.

XHTML was dropped because it wasn’t backwards compatible, and it was too strict in its syntax. Minor syntax errors that could be automatically corrected by the browser turned into full page errors.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#25

Post by dofm »

kccqzy wrote: post #2

In 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…

> Why is the country name an attribute but not the rank?

Perhaps because it's an example of what is possible in XML and how to parse it, and not, in fact, a particularly good or canonical example of XML?

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#26

Post by woodruffw »

dofm wrote: post #25
kccqzy wrote: post #2

In 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…

> Why is the country name an attribute but not the rank? Perhaps because it's an example of what is possible in XML and how to parse it, and not, in fact, a particularly good or canonical example of XML?

I think GP’s question was rhetorical. They know it’s an example.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#27

Post by edflsafoiewq »

jolmg wrote: post #17
reenorap wrote: post #11

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.

> 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 di…

In data structure terms, attributes do allow nodes to be decorated with additional information without forcing any change on existing parsers. In JSON, this would require swapping, eg. "str" -> {"value": "str", "attrib1": "..."}.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#28

Post by kccqzy »

sfn42 wrote: post #18
kccqzy wrote: post #2

In 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 ne…

That is actually a good approach that I have also used a lot: let the parsing library handle everything including the serialization and deserialization. But if you do that, why do you care that behind the scenes it is using JSON or XML or protobuf or something else?

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#29

Post by conartist6 »

hackrmn wrote: post #7

Every 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…

What do you think of CSTML? It's my attempt to heal the rift between XML and HTML5, as well as solving all the problems that made XML feel onerous to use... https://docs.bablr.org/guides/cstml

It's simple to parse like JSON, it has namespaces like XML (but better), and it doesn't require you to repeat the name of every element twice.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#30

Post by hahahaa »

Aside I love how about me is just another tag and clicking lists 3 blog posts.

On XML I don't hate. I hate wrapping my head around XSLT but that is more about my head. AI may make XSLTing more bearable as it happens? I did work with someone passionate about XSLT. Aaaand now I am doxxed.

I also thing in practice schemaless i.e. JSON or "the schema is look at the code or some logs lol" won because fuck let's face it that is more fun.

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