On Sunday, 10 May 2015 at 08:54:09 UTC, Joakim wrote:
It's worse than shabby, it's a horrible, horrible choice. Not just for data formats, but for _anything_. XML should not be used.
I feel the same way about XML, and I also think that having strong aesthetic internal emotional responses is often necessary to achieve excellence in engineering.
But why do we often end up dealing with these two? Familiarity, that is the only reason. XML seems familiar to anybody who's written some HTML, and JSON became familiar to web developers initially. Starting from those two large niches, they've expanded out to become the two most popular data interchange formats, despite XML being a horrible mess and JSON being too simple for many uses.
Sometimes you get to pick, but often not. I can hardly tell the UK Debt Management Office to give up XML and switch to msgpack structs (well, I can, but I am not sure they would listen). So at the moment for some data series I use a python library via PyD to convert xml files to JSON. But it would be nice to do it all in D.
I am not sure XML is going away very soon since new protocols keep being created using it. (Most recent one I heard of is one for allowing hedge funds to achieve full transparency of their portfolio to end investors - not necessarily something that will achieve what people think it will, but one in tune with the times).
Laeeth.
