21–30 of 63 posts
Funny. Among other things, XML is self describing . Yeah sure. We all know how that turned out. That was the day when everybody was crazy about the Semantic Web, and for some reason XML / some convoluted format built on XML was viewed by many as "semantic", apparently because of the many intractable URLs the format called for. Y'know, URLs, or was it URIs or URNs, those little pieces of text that, even when they poin…
Disregarding the emphasis on XML -> replaced with JSON, isn't this actually mostly spot-on re the popularity of Single-Page Apps (SPA)? There is very little if any HTML in the form of the text-based markup involved in a modern SPA - the actual display logic is all DOM manipulation in JavaScript, operating on separate APIs providing just the raw data in JSON form. > Truly powerful applications can be built using combi…
Only if you accept the initial premise, which is nonsense. The article is based on the idea of HTML as an interchange format, something that's only the case in dysfunctional situations (scraping data illegally, or a horrific breakdown in communication/collaboration between two business entities).
Sure, there was a for a time a big focus on XHTML as a "hybrid" format - interweaving Microformats/RDF & other machine-readable metadata into display documents to give them a dual purpose, but even with that, the primary purpose was always human display, not machine-readability.
HTML isn't designed as, nor primarily intended to be, a machine interchange format. And espousing such hyperbole as "HTML is a strategic dead end" based on it not meeting a use-case for which it was never designed, is harmful.
> The main thrust in this article is that scraping HTML display markup is a terrible form of data interchange between systems.
This is a perfect summary. Would it be nice if more HTML websites were more machine-readable - sure. For me, a hacker, it would make life nicer. But should it be a pre-requisite for business transactions & e-commerce to function - absolutely not.
All this talk of XML has given me some bad XSLT flashbacks, not to mention XSL:FO.
Funny. Among other things, XML is self describing . Yeah sure. We all know how that turned out. That was the day when everybody was crazy about the Semantic Web, and for some reason XML / some convoluted format built on XML was viewed by many as "semantic", apparently because of the many intractable URLs the format called for. Y'know, URLs, or was it URIs or URNs, those little pieces of text that, even when they poin…
XML was just a few steps in the wrong direction and it diverted all users energy nowhere. When I see sexp as serialization format I miss very few, same for json.. but xml wasn't that different. Just too much noise (ns,attributes) and just not enough genericity (no generic list or map) made it useless. Surprising.
When you start expecting ordered maps or add arbitrary attributes to container types things becomes exotic very quickly.
Reference could might be ok (some json APIs make it work) but it complicates the parsing.
And that doesn't even get into the hell of xml that actually executes code.
Not surprising to me that a smaller standard won out.
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My prediction: HTML will die way before HTTP. We will replace that language eventually, HTTP is here to stay.
HTTP is kinda dead already, with browsers insisting on HTTPS.
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There is a lot of glue code written because we are only transporting data through HTTP, that is the problem. A concept that has been buzzing around my head a lot lately is, what if we could model objects/actors? So that I do not only go to google.com to display some HTML, but we have a standardised RPC language I can tell it to "search this query" and it returns a structured object? The same RPC I can use to talk to…
> I want the Internet to be like the Erlang virtual machine. Each server is an independent actor that holds state, can send and receive messages, but they are not very trusted. you sound quite a bit like Alan Kay there (and that's not a bad thing IMO).