81–90 of 265 posts
What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…
I don't really understand what he's talking about here (my ignorance, not his fault.) Is it something like https://camlistore.org/ that is a content addressable (the git part) datastore?
I don't quite get Linus' problem with XML for document markup (for anything else - config files, build scripts - sure, XML is horrible). Does anyone know any more details about what his specific gripe is? For me, asciidoc (which looks very similar, conceptually, to markdown) suffers from one huge problem: it's incomplete. Substituting symbols for words results in a more limited vocabulary, if that vocabulary is to re…
For those who missed it, here's what Linus wrote in the comments: "+Aaron Traas no, XML isn't even good for document markup. Use 'asciidoc' for document markup. Really. It's actually readable by humans, and easier to parse and way more flexible than XML. XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horribl…
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Maybe you want to wait till he release something. Cause you know, if he took months to get the big picture in mind, I doubt you grasp what he envision just by reading his comment.
Yes, because his design of git was so well-formed. Git is so well-designed that expert users manage to trash their repositories and propagate the damage. Maybe that's not a problem of libgit. But tools are both the infrastructure and the UI.
What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…
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People seem to prefer JSON, but I don't find it any better to hand-write/hand-edit than XML. If anything it's slightly worse, because it has more syntax edge cases.
JSON is explicitly not designed to be hand-editable. Hence, for example, no comments. It's just meant to be human readable. If you want human editable "json", use Yaml: http://www.yaml.org/ (it's a superset of Json that adds comments, linking etc.)
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This link needs to be posted again and again and again. I'm sure quite a lot of people will easily recognize it. :^) Subject: Re: S-exp vs XML, HTML, LaTeX (was: Why lisp is growing) https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.li...
That's a wonderful rant - I particularly appreciate the digression into anti-bush rhetoric - but : 1. There's very little detail here; it's a nicely worded, emotionally charged piece that leaves a lot of detail unaddressed, e.g. "'I would like to hear why you think it is so bad, can you be more specific please?' If you really need more information, search the Net, please." That's not very helpful. 2. It argues for 's…
In particular: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3224334063725870@naggum....
with key words being "Whather what you are really after is foo, bar, or zot, depends on your application.".
His articles on SGML are mandatory reading too.
Several years ago someone posted these links and it opened wonderful world of Lisp to me. Not the language per se (there are many languages) but whole another Universe of how things could be done. I swear I jumped on the chair reading every page of CL standard, how brilliant it is on every level to C. Eventually it led me to rethink attitude to C and Unix in general, core parts of which I despise now.
So here am I returning favor, maybe someone will follow these links too.
Thank you, Erik. Rest in peace.
What's with all the XML hate? Of course, doing everything in XML is a stupid idea (e.g. XSLT and Ant) and thanks heaven that hype is over. But if I want something that is able to express data structures customized by myself, usually with hierarchical data that can be verified for validity and syntax (XML Schemas or old-school DTD), what other options are there? Doing hierarchical data in SQL is a bitch and if you wan…
XML is unnecessarily verbose, for the supposed sake of human readability. But used as a serialization format, it isn't really readable or editable by humans (except in the sense that a Turing machine is programmable): remember that the ML in XML stands for "markup language", and SGML, its predecessor, was designed as a way of marking up normal text, not littering data with angular brackets and identifiers. (XML/SGML…
What would be better?
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One of the core aspects of XML that is really important is that no typing is inferred by the structure of the file unlike JSON. JSON is by nature tied to the JavaScript type system which is sparse and inaccurate. For example, if you look at the following: { "name": "bob", "salary": 1e999 } Ah crap! Deserializer blew (in most cases silently converting the number to null) bob 1e999 No problem. The consumer can throw th…
Your example doesn't do anything but make XML look as bad as your saying JSON is. Think about it again - do you think your first XML example doesn't ALSO have to be deserialized twice (once into an XML in memory tree, once into a number)? It does. Also, both examples will fail if you try to deserialize either of them into numbers... Regardless, JSON is so much more readable that I'm very glad it's pushed XML out of t…
XML can be read as a stream and at certain points like after reading an element or attribute, an object can be created on the fly or a property on an object set and the type deserialised at the same time. The types don't have to be native types either; they can be complex types or aggregate types such as any numeric abstraction or date type you desire.
See java.xml.stream (Java) and System.Xml (CLR) for example.
As for readability, some XML is bad which is probably what you've seen but there's plenty that's well designed.
XML is afflicted with piles of criticism which usually comes from poor understanding or looking at machine targeted schemas that humans don't care about.
You'd complain the same if you looked at protobufs over the wire with a hex editor.