The lost art of XML

Post by lighthouse1212 » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 10:02 AM UTC

locknitpicker wrote: post #43

lighthouse1212 wrote: post #28

XML was designed for documents; JSON for data structures. The 'lost art' framing implies we forgot something valuable, but what actually happened is we stopped using a document format for data serialization. That's not forgetting - that's learning. XML is still the right choice for its original domain (markup, documents with mixed content). It was never the right choice for API payloads and config files.

> XML was designed for documents; JSON for data structures. JSON wasn't even designed for anything. It's literally the necessary and sufficient part of JavaScript that you could pass to an eval() to get a data structure out. It required zero tooling and even third-party module to hit the ground running.

Post by tilt_error » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 12:02 PM UTC

kennethallen wrote: post #24

The fundamental reason JSON won over XML is that JSON maps exactly to universal data structures (lists and string-keyed maps) and XML does not.

Post by howdyhowdyhowdy » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 12:32 PM UTC

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #34

howdyhowdyhowdy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if bandwidth was a concern, JSON was a poor solution. XML compresses nicely and efficiently. Yes it can be verbose to the human eyes, but I don't know if bandwidth is the reason it's not used more often.

JSON absolutely isn't perfect, but it's a spec that you can explain in ~5 minutes, mirrors common PL syntax for Dict/Array, and is pretty much superior to XML in every way.

Post by zarzavat » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote: post #44

zarzavat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to use the right tool for the job. XML is extensible markup, i.e. it's like HTML that can be applied to tasks outside of representing web pages. It's designed to be written by hand. It has comments! A good use for XML would be declaring a native UI: it's not HTML but it's like HTML. JSON is a plain text serialization format. It's designed to be generated and consumed by computers whilst being readable by hum…

> It's designed to be written by hand Are you sure about that? I've heard XML gurus say the exact opposite. This is a very good example of why I detest the phrase “use the right tool for the job.” People say this as an appeal to reason, as if there weren't an obvious follow-up question that different people might answer very differently.

Post by mickael-kerjean » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #45

in_a_society wrote: post #13

Smells like an article from someone that didn’t really USE the XML ecosystem. First, there is modeling ambiguity, too many ways to represent the same data structure. Which means you can’t parse into native structs but instead into a heavy DOM object and it sucks to interact with it. Then, schemas sound great, until you run into DTD, XSD, and RelaxNG. Relax only exists because XSD is pretty much incomprehensible. Then…

I read the article and my first thought was it was entirely missing the complexity of XML. It started out relatively simple and easy to understand and most people/programs wrote simple XML that looked a lot like HTML still does. But it didn't take long before XML might well be a binary format for all it matters to us humans looking at it, parsing it, dealing with it. JSON came along and it's simplicity was baked in.…