Do you hate XML? (2010) • Hacker News Board

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#71

Post by lenkite » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 10:59 AM UTC

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…

Length-limited, singular and scalar pieces of data can definitely be held in attributes. It is perfectly fine to have:

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#72

Post by zvr » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

davidpapermill wrote: post #32

Last year we chose XML as the basis for our document language. It's been a good choice for designing a new language, but we've been really surprised by the poor quality of the available parsers. We figured it would be a solved problem, but we'll be writing our own at some point.

I completely agree that it is the best choice for a document language.

To the point that I have to ask: what other alternatives are there?

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#73

Post by pelcg » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:03 AM UTC

XML is just so much hassle to parse securely, and it is extremely difficult to get right.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#74

Post by davidpapermill » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:11 AM UTC

zvr wrote: post #72

davidpapermill wrote: post #32

Last year we chose XML as the basis for our document language. It's been a good choice for designing a new language, but we've been really surprised by the poor quality of the available parsers. We figured it would be a solved problem, but we'll be writing our own at some point.

I completely agree that it is the best choice for a document language. To the point that I have to ask: what other alternatives are there?

It's a good question. We had a previous language, JDoc, based in JSON. It covered only part of the functionality of the XML-based language and was really only for machine-machine.

We researched a bunch of others: languages like LaTeX and Typst are obvious alternatives. We also considered a super-augmented version of Markdown. Even looked at YAML.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#75

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC

Not at all, actually it is much better than JSON or YAML, which its advocates eventually had to come up with all the tooling that XML already had in place.

Schemas, comments, transformation tooling, IDE integration,....

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#76

Post by Shakahs » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 11:37 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #75

Not at all, actually it is much better than JSON or YAML, which its advocates eventually had to come up with all the tooling that XML already had in place. Schemas, comments, transformation tooling, IDE integration,....

JSON is okay most of the time, but I loath YAML.

How many Kubernetes administration headaches trace back to the need for automated systems to surgically edit YAML? It’s absurd and YAML may be the worst choice for this use case.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#77

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:04 PM UTC

Shakahs wrote: post #76

pjmlp wrote: post #75

Not at all, actually it is much better than JSON or YAML, which its advocates eventually had to come up with all the tooling that XML already had in place. Schemas, comments, transformation tooling, IDE integration,....

JSON is okay most of the time, but I loath YAML. How many Kubernetes administration headaches trace back to the need for automated systems to surgically edit YAML? It’s absurd and YAML may be the worst choice for this use case.

Recently I go to learn data ingestion pipelines configured in YAML for ETL purposes in SPARK, instead of plain SQL, oh the pain to debug anything.

Kubernetes makes me miss WebSphere 5, the version is on purpose, before the usability goodies that came up in 6.1.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#78

Post by bzzzt » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:23 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #21

actionfromafar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YAML made me not hate XML.

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

Sure. Standards like EDIFACT make XML seem like a big improvement.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#79

Post by JonChesterfield » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

davidpapermill wrote: post #32

Last year we chose XML as the basis for our document language. It's been a good choice for designing a new language, but we've been really surprised by the poor quality of the available parsers. We figured it would be a solved problem, but we'll be writing our own at some point.

Libxml2 segv when the input is large and the transform complicated was something of a surprise to me. Parsing xml is easy enough but I think implementing xslt is going to be a nuisance.

Re: Do you hate XML? (2010)

#80

Post by ahartmetz » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 12:59 PM UTC

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…

I think XML's main problem is the ridiculous hype-wave that started in the late 90s. I really didn't want to see and hear XML anymore at the time. It was clear to me that it was no more and no less than a slightly awkward toolbox to build your own domain-specific language. Stupid as some of the later hype waves were, most weren't as stupid as the XML hype wave (with the notable exception of blockchain all the things).

XML is actually okay to work with, I don't mind it. XML schemas, XSLT and such are a little more... special, but also used much more rarely.