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Do you hate XML? (2010)

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Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#41

Post by gf000 »

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…

I would even go as far to say that XML may very well be better in some cases, - here you have a schema most of the time, so you can often catch e.g. schema evolution failures at compile time.

This is much less common/less standardized with json.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#44

Post by throw310822 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #35
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…

Cardinality is the easy way to resolve this. If the data has a cardinality of 1, it should be an attribute. If cardinality > 1, it should be a child element/node.

Not sure I understand. How do you represent an object nested in another object?

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#45

Post by gf000 »

dgrunwald wrote: post #33
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…

> Furthermore parsing JSON or YAML gives you 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. More precisely: in XML, elements (nodes) are named/labeled. ("node-labeled graph") In JSON, keys (edges) are named. ("edge-labeled graph") In programming, we need names for the fields in our structures (edges between objects), so…

Well, "easier" may well be "one less dimension to encode data" in this case.

Sure, this gives quite a few variations on how to serialize some data. But it's not like json's simpler approach would make data serialization universal, there are many different ways to encode the same thing.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#46

Post by frollogaston »

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…

I hate the X and L parts too. Just because you put a URL inside doesn't make the other side understand your structure. The features that try to make it extensible actually make it less so.

I can't think of any cases XML has helped, and plenty where it's massively gotten in the way. XMPP should've been json for instance. React used something like XML in structure for JSX but didn't actually use XML, so thank goodness we didn't have to put xmlns= all over it.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#47

Post by atoav »

XML is ok, the problem IMO is that the way some people use(d) it is utterly unhinged.

So a return value that could have easily been two lined of text is now a nested demon of XML. The complexity isn't what that application does, the complexity is in how it returns the values.

Another good one is to use XML when something else would have made things simpler, e.g. for a config file where you could easily have used a .ini or a .toml file.

Or you have an application that tries to so generic that the definition for a simple use case is a whopping 5MB XML file. Cool. When I feel writing a config for your application is harder than programming the whole thing yourself you have really made it. /s

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#48

Post by gf000 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #16
cryptos wrote: post #4

At 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.

> They implemented half of Common Lisp in a markup language

Come on, S expressions are just trees, they are not God's gift to humankind.. and just because a language has an AST (surprise, a tree again!) doesn't make it a lisp. I can write a C program's AST as sexprs or a Haskell program's, yet neither will be a lisp.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#49

Post by [deleted] »

dtech wrote: post #36
crispyambulance wrote: post #3

XML 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. M…

It's non-trivial to implement XML parser in a secure way, many stdlib ones are insecure by default. That should just not be a thing. XML has a bunch of vulnerabilities very specific to it, XXE is the most well known one, but you also have a bunch of DoSes due to expansions and XPath injection etc. An object serialization format should not have a bunch of footguns and vulnerability categories specific to it.

[deleted]

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#50

Post by notnullorvoid »

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…

The one good feature of HTML 5 was the introduction of boolean attributes. It's a feature XML could and should adopt.

The whole handling of custom elements was fumbled beyond belief. The HTML spec is a disaster particularly it's parsing rules the complexity of which is used as excuse by HTML spec authors not to improve the language.

XHTML was a better path.

I think the reason we don't see too many people complaining about HTML 5 is because not many web programmers use it directly, most are using JSX.

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