XML is a superior format to Json or yaml or any of those other trendy formats around today. It’s the hill I’m willing to die on because I’m right.
XML aims to be both human-readable and machine-readable, but manages neither. It’s only really worth it if you actually need the complexity or extensibility, otherwise it’s just a major pain to map XML structures to any sensible type representation. I’ve been forced to work with some of the protocols that people like to present as examples of good XML usage and I hate every single one of them.
Fuck YAML though. That spec is longer and more complex than any other markup language I know of and it doesn’t have a single fully compliant implementation.
I’m okay with the “human-readability,” but I’ve never been happy with the “machine-readibility” of XML. Usually I just want to pull a few values from an API return, yet every XML library assumes I want the entire file in a data structure that I can iterate through. It’s a waste of resources and a pain in the ass.
Even though it’s not the “right” way, most of the time I just use regex to grab whatever exists between an opening and closing tag. If I’m saving/loading data from my own software, I just use a serialization library.
Yep, it’s a PITA to parse and get the values you want. Much prefer JSON. Recently when I needed to parse XML I ran it through an XML to JSON library. Much easier!
If you need to parse XML just for RSS though, it isn’t so bad as there are RSS specific libraries which take most of the pain away.
Yeah, I remember when I was trying to parse XML into some lua tables and it forever stumped me how to represent something like
<thing important_param=10 other_param="abracadabra"> stuff </thing>
You just have to have different ways to turn different tags into stuff in your program and that’s a huge amount of overhead to think about when all I want is a hash map and maybe an array.
From my point of view : it has a hudge ecosystem with tons of robust libraries. This does not make it perfect, but for an industrial point of view, you don’t look for new shiny clean things. (My point of view is 15 years old yet…)
Something being “old” is totally unrelated to whether it’s trendy. See: virtually every food and fashion trend.
Uh-huh… ever tried to integrate with a poorly implement WCF service? Like communication from a Java service to a dotnet service through a WSDL?
I’ll take a json API over XML any day
I’m not sure that’s the fault of XML though.
It’s more the fault of the implementation and documentation.
We have a WCF service with an odd configuration and nobody has been able to integrate with it that didn’t use Microsoft tools. It’s definitely not XML’s fault.
(That service has been replaced with a REST API now)
It’s more the fault of the implementation and documentation.
Yea sure. Though it’s slightly XMLs fault for allowing that kinda implementations. Every random thing is in it’s own obscure namespace with 20 levels of nested objects in different namespaces, and if you get anything wrong it barely explains what’s wrong, and just refuses to work.
It’s mostly WCFs fault. I just automatically associate XML with nightmare flashbacks of implementing WCF stuff
