Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

JSON vs. XML

corecursive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 252 posts

Re: JSON vs. XML

#11

Post by adamgordonbell »

justin66 wrote: post #5
adamgordonbell wrote: post #3

This quote is funny: Douglas: The first time I saw JavaScript when it was first announced in 1995, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. And partly why I thought that was because they were lying about what it was. A bigger more interesting thing though is how his company failed, in part, because they used hand-rolled JSON for messaging. Douglas: And some of our customers were confused and said, “Well, w…

I really respect that you provide transcripts. It's terribly important for accessibility and for getting what people have said into the various search engines. I was sad to hear that Crockford is not aiming to be the author of "the next language" anymore, but I wonder how sincere that really is. His thoughts on actor-based languages are interesting.

Thanks!

Crockford's thoughts on actors are really interesting. I tried to pull them apart but I didn't get very far and ended up not including them in the episode.

What he is envisioning is not exactly like Erlang but not exactly like Scheme. He said that Carl Hewitt had a lot of ideas and they were hard to unpack.

If you're interested though, I would reach out to him. He is very approachable and excited to talk to people with ideas for new ways of making things simple.

Re: JSON vs. XML

#12

Post by sirwhinesalot »

bayindirh wrote: post #8
adamgordonbell wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about JSON being created or discovered and Doug struggling to convince people it was relevant when everyone was so bought in on XML. Are you saying you think JSON shouldn't exist and everyone should use XML for everything? Tooling around XML was certainly more established, but man there was a lot of complexity built up around it.

No. JSON is great as Javascript's serialization format, but it's not as readable and robust as XML, period. I use both extensively, and for bigger objects and definitions, XML is a very clear winner. I'm a big believer in horses for courses type of approach, and my personal gripe is the push to replace one thing with another. These data types can coexist, and can be used where they shine. XML can be read and written…

XML is great except at being a configuration format, a messaging format, a serialization format, or any other purpose really. It's not insane like YAML I'll give it that. I'll take XML over that garbage any day.

Re: JSON vs. XML

#13

Post by user3939382 »

If it's not obvious, the issue is that standardizing a data format is going to have trade offs. Interoperability, leveraging tooling universally so all effort is going in the same direction, awesome. The problem is that some uses cases for the format are going to be insanely complex, which will make the standard and tools unnecessarily complex for the simple cases.

JSON is simpler and easier for many cases, but then you lose the interoperability. Go try to make an app right now dealing with Federal government systems or finance, you're going to end up translating JSONXML which isn't fun.

There's not going to be a silver bullet solution to this problem, it's not completely solvable.

Re: JSON vs. XML

#14

Post by adamgordonbell »

meepmorp wrote: post #9
adamgordonbell wrote: post #3

This quote is funny: Douglas: The first time I saw JavaScript when it was first announced in 1995, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. And partly why I thought that was because they were lying about what it was. A bigger more interesting thing though is how his company failed, in part, because they used hand-rolled JSON for messaging. Douglas: And some of our customers were confused and said, “Well, w…

I remember a meeting where a consultant from an MCP excitedly told our mutual client that the XP in the upcoming version of Windows stood for 'XML Protocol.' More innocent times.

Scala had XML literals as part of the language!

Apparently Philip Wadler was the person who told them needed it, because the future was XML.

( Walder is big Haskell/PL person)

Re: JSON vs. XML

#15

Post by dvh »

For me 3 killer features of JSON are:

1. Parsing JSON doesn't require adding new firewall rules

2. There are no comments, so nobody will try to invent their own meta format or annotations in comments and instead they will put data in the JSON as they should

3. (When compared to JS) someone finally had the balls and picked one type of quotes, this makes making parser so much simpler.

Re: JSON vs. XML

#16

Post by fatnoah »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #3

This quote is funny: Douglas: The first time I saw JavaScript when it was first announced in 1995, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. And partly why I thought that was because they were lying about what it was. A bigger more interesting thing though is how his company failed, in part, because they used hand-rolled JSON for messaging. Douglas: And some of our customers were confused and said, “Well, w…

> I started my career during peak XML crazy and while I liked parts of it at the time, the number of things it was used for was quite insane. I had to maintain a system once where a major part of it was XSLT, when could have just been a simple imperative algo with some config settings.

Same here. XML was going to save the world! Remember XML data islands with data embedded in page source and displayed via XSLT?

The craziest thing I had to build was a tool to manage the dozens to hundreds of XML configuration files that powered our product. The tool allowed editing and deploying the files, complete with validation and even input suggestion based on associated XSD for each XML file.

Re: JSON vs. XML

#17

Post by oblio »

dvh wrote: post #15

For me 3 killer features of JSON are: 1. Parsing JSON doesn't require adding new firewall rules 2. There are no comments, so nobody will try to invent their own meta format or annotations in comments and instead they will put data in the JSON as they should 3. (When compared to JS) someone finally had the balls and picked one type of quotes, this makes making parser so much simpler.

JSON could really use schemas as part of the main implementation.

Local schemas, not crazy remote schemas.

Or some sort of way to bless an "official" schema format.

Re: JSON vs. XML

#18

Post by sanitycheck »

I have huge respect for Doug Crockford, and I never imagined I would disagree with him.

However I think by now we've seen that a lot of that "unnecessary" XML complexity was not, in fact, entirely unnecessary. These days we use JSON for everything, but now we've got JSON Schema, Swagger/OpenAPI, Zod, etc etc. It's not really simpler and there's a lot of manual work - we might as well be using XML, XSD & SOAP/WSDL.

Re: JSON vs. XML

#20

Post by hestefisk »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #11
justin66 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really respect that you provide transcripts. It's terribly important for accessibility and for getting what people have said into the various search engines. I was sad to hear that Crockford is not aiming to be the author of "the next language" anymore, but I wonder how sincere that really is. His thoughts on actor-based languages are interesting.

Thanks! Crockford's thoughts on actors are really interesting. I tried to pull them apart but I didn't get very far and ended up not including them in the episode. What he is envisioning is not exactly like Erlang but not exactly like Scheme. He said that Carl Hewitt had a lot of ideas and they were hard to unpack. If you're interested though, I would reach out to him. He is very approachable and excited to talk to p…

Just wanted to say your podcasts are really good. Many podcasters aim for quantity over quality; with you it’s the other way around. Thank you!
Post reply on HN