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XML is an embarrassment. It solves no problem: not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data. The only thing it does is give programmers something r
by dissenter 18y ago
XML is an embarrassment. It solves no problem: not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data. The only thing it does is give programmers something recognizable to fiddle with, however irrelevant to the problem it may be.
Most religious wars in computer science hinge on matters of taste. If you prefer emacs to vi, maybe that's just your style. If you prefer PHP to Ruby, there may be several good reasons why.
There is no such ambiguity in the case of XML. If you prefer XML to anything but XML, you don't know what you're talking about. You should have no say in anything that affects other programmers.
We're in this mess because of the unforeseen popularity of the web. When the web was created, its designers chose a simple and not particularly good markup language. Then the web grew, and instead of everybody recognizing the language as bad and replacing it, we turned a blind eye to its faults and kept it around.
The immense popularity of the web has glossed over all the deficiencies present in markup languages. People can't imagine that anything that built the internet might have something wrong with it. The internet is good, so anything that built the internet must be good as well.
Markup language was ill-conceived. Generalizing it into XML was folly.
How can you possibly take XML seriously? How do you squeeze an entire blog post out of it? Have you never bothered to look at the technology? The author is obviously capable of writing a coherent, well-thought out essay. Did he never stop and look at what he was doing and go, "This is a whole lot of shit!"
- utnick 18y agoMaybe I am missing something, but I think thats a little extreme... If I have some data structures that I am trying to send from my C# windows app to your java unix app, how would you propose we do that? With XML, we can easily agree and collaborate on a format and both of our languages have builtin libraries to extract the data we need. Its easy to build and easy to debug.
- ajross 18y agoYes. The fact that XML parsers are pervasive is a good thing, and an advantage for XML as a technology. But it says absolutely nothing about XML as a metadata format. A standard parser suite for anything would have the same advantages. Note also that there are other technologies with pervasively available parsers, like JSON, which don't share any of XML's warts.
- dissenter 18y agoOK, I'm going to send you a list using XML. Now how do you propose we do that? This is entirely the problem. The XML didn't solve anything. We still have to negotiate the terms of the transfer. We've agreed to use XML, true, but we are still at square one.
- olavk 18y agoOf course you have to negotiate the terms of the transfer. You have to do that using any format (custom binary, XML, JSON, s-expressions, whatever). XML just defines a lot of common syntactic stuff which you would have to define anyway in any format you decide on.
- sah 18y agoI would argue that there's very little value in standardizing that syntactic stuff. Whatever tiny amount of value there might be is probably destroyed by picking a convention as almost universally inappropriate as XML.
- utnick 18y ago<list><listitem>a</listitem><listitem>b</listitem><listitem>c</listitem></list> ? The xml solved the problem of me having to write a parser from scratch for whatever terms of transfer you come up with. And I don't really see the downside for most applications.
- BrandonM 18y agoSo the fact that 96% of the characters you are sending are markup is not a downside? S-expressions solved this problem a long time ago. (a b c) is only 57% markup. I don't think you can get much more succinct than that and still express the idea of a list.
- utnick 18y agoIt is a downside, but most of the time I don't care. If I am sending some big list many times and speed really matters, then I care, but usually I am not. Size and speed are cheap nowadays.
- olavk 18y agoWhat do you propose instead of a markup language for the things HTML is used for?
- omouse 18y agoI think by markup language he means SGML or its derivatives.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- jcromartie 18y agoI think that my favorite quip on the topic is: “XML is a giant step in no direction at all.” (Erik Naggum)
- qwph 18y agoHe also said this (I don't think he's much of an XML fan): "Structure is _nothing_ if it is all you got. Skeletons _spook_ people if they try to walk around on their own. I really wonder why XML does not."
- fizx 18y agoXML is like Java. The language isn't friendly, but the platform has so many man-years invested into it that it may be the best tool for the job. Maybe my "taste" is to have a solid platform at the expense of some syntactic niceties. Any any case, saying that anyone who disagrees with you is certainly ignorant just makes you come off as foolish.
- mtts 18y agoAn embarrassment that solves no problem, not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data? Surely you jest. In the real world, well, my world anyway, the problem of how to transfer bits of data around in a file format wildly different systems can understand is a major problem indeed, even if it's not a terribly sexy one, and the, admittedly ugly, representation of data in some sort of HTML-inspired fashion may not be anywhere near a solution for the data representation problem, it's most definitely better than not making a stab at solving the problem at all.
- trevelyan 18y agoI'm confused as well. XML is fantastic for providing an easy way to roll customized data storage and interchange documents. The article is pointing to technologies like JSON as a "backlash" to XML. I only use JSON when sending PHP objects directly to javascript to manipulate. Why create a data interchange format if you don't need to?