Some data formats are easy for humans to read but difficult for computers to efficiently parse. Others, like packed binary data, are dead simple for computers to parse but borderline impossible for a human to read.
XML bucks this trend and bravely proves that data formats do not have to be one or the other by somehow managing to be bad at both.
The thing is, it was never really intended as a storage format for plain data. It’s a markup language, so you’re supposed to use it for describing complex documents, like it’s used in HTML for example. It was just readily available as a library in many programming languages when not much else was, so it got abused for data storage a lot.
That’s why professionals use XML or JSON for this kind of projects and SQL for that kind of projects. And sometimes even both. It simply depends on the kind of problem to solve.
Strong competition from yaml and json on this point however
JSON not supporting comments is a human rights violation
Wouldn’t go that far, but it’s an annoyance for sure.
I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it’s automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with
//comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.
Alright, the YAML spec is a dang mess, that I’ll grant you, but it seems pretty easy for my human eyes to read and write. As for JSON – seriously? That’s probably the easiest to parse human-readable structured data format there is!
it is anything but easy to read if your entire file does not fit on a single screen.
What data format is easy to read if it fills more than the entire screen?
I don’t know much apart from the basics of YAML, what makes it complicated for computers to parse?
Just a while ago, I read somewhere: XML is like violence. If it doesn’t solve your problem, maybe you are not using it enough.
There are people who find XML hard to read?
I’m starting to like this AI thing…
Don’t drink the JSON coolaid. XML is fine. Better, in many cases, because XML files actually support comments.
In the modern programming world, XML is just JSON before JSON was cool. There was a whole hype about XML for a few years, which is why old programming tools are full of XML.
It’s funny but sad to see the JSON ecosystem scramble to invent all of the features that XML already had. Even ActivityPub runs on “external entities but stored as general purpose strings”, and don’t get me started on the incompatible, incomplete standards for describing a JSON schema.
It’s not just XML either, now there’s cap’n proto and protobuf and bson which are all just ASN.1 but “cool”.
That’s my biggest peev about JSON actually. No comments!! WTH!
IMHO: XML is a file format, JSON is a data transfer format. Reinventing things like RSS or SVG to use JSON wouldn’t be helpful, but using XML to communicate between your app’s frontend and backend wouldn’t be either.
Most web frameworks contain code to exchange JSON over
XMLHttpRequestfor a reason. XML is and always has been a data transfer format as well as a file format. JSON is, too. The amount ofconfig.jsons I’ve had to mess with…but using XML to communicate between your app’s frontend and backend wouldn’t be either
I don’t see why not? The entrypoint of web frontends is sent as HTML already. I guess that’s based on SGML, XML’s weird and broken cousin. Outputting XML is just a matter of configuring whatever model serialiser from JSON to XML.
There are a few good arguments against XML, but those also work against JSON.
Of course you can use XML that way, but it is unnecessarily verbose and complex because you have to make decisions, like, whether to store things as attributes or as nested elements.
I stand by my statement that if you’re saving things to a file you should probably use XML, if you’re transferring data over a network you should probably use JSON.
The amount of
config.jsons I’ve had to mess with…Yeah, json is not a good config format. As much as xml is not. Please use something like YAML or TOML.
I never moved away from ini I’ve just been sititng back watching you all re-invent the wheel over and over and over and over and over.
We were using XML for that before JSON.
{ "key": "six", "value": 6, "comment": "6 is a bad number. Use five." }Please don’t. If you need something like json but with comments, then use YAML or TOML. Those formats are designed to be human-readable by default, json is better suited for interchanging information between different pieces of software. And if you really need comments inside JSON, then find a parser that supports
//or/* */syntax.That’s not a comment, that’s a field. There’s a reason
var comment = "Increments i by 1"isn’t how you comment in any programs.
And there are some truly magic tools.
XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.
XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.
XSD and XSLT files alone can replace half the JSON applications I’ve seen. I can see why it’s easier to take the barebones JSON notation and reinvent the wheel, but those tiny programs are the “Excel+VBA” of web applications.
And don’t forget about namespaces. Look at formats like HAL and ODATA that try to add HATEOAS onto JSON.
I came into the industry right when XML fever had peaked as was beginning to fall back. But in MS land, it never really went away, just being slowly cannibalize by JSON.
You’re right though, there was some cool stuff being done with xml when it was assumed that it would be the future of all data formats. Being able to apply standard tools like XLT transforms, XSS styling, schemas to validate, and XPath to search/query and you had some very powerful generic tools.
JSON has barely caught up to that with schemes and transforms. JQ lets you query json but I don’t really find it more readable or usable than XPath. I’m sure something like XLT exists, but there’s no standardization or attempt to rally around shared tools like with XML.
That to me is the saddest thing. VC/MBA-backed companies have driven everyone into the worst cases of NIHS ever. Now there’s no standards, no attempts to share work or unify around reliable technology. Its every company for themselves and getting other people suckered into using (and freely maintaining) your tools as a prelude to locking them into your ecosystem is the norm now.
BASED. What is the name of this AI? I want to use this.
A word document is xml
zipped xml!
Lots or file formats are just zipped XML.
I was
reverse engineeringfucking around with the LBX file format for our Brother label printer’s software at work, because I wanted to generate labels programmatically, and they’re zipped XML too. Terrible format, LBX, really annoying to work with. The parser in Brother P-Touch Editor is really picky too. A string is 1 character longer or shorter than the length you defined in an attribute earlier in the XML? “I’ve never seen this file format in my life,” says P-Touch Editor.Sounds like it’s actually using XSLT or some kind of content validation. Which to be honest sounds like a good practice.
Wow, that’s a very passive aggressive reaction. I enjoyed a lot.
This is what happens when stack overflow is used for training.
XML is good for markup. The problem is that people too often confuse “markup” and “serialization”.
Too redundant, just use S-exprs.
(Mostly joking, but in some cases…)
Unironically.
Given the choice between S-expressions and XML, I will choose S-expressions.
wateI mean, it’s not wrong…
Disagree. I prefer XML for config files where the efficiency of disk size doesn’t matter at all. Layers of XML are much easier to read than layers of Json. Json is generally better where efficiency matters.
Aren’t most XML parsers faster than JSON parsers anyway?
Wishful thinking
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I hate writing xml with a passion
If you are writing it then you are doing it wrong.
Listen we all know deep down the solution is to try to parse it with regex
OH HEY EVERYONE, EVERYONE, THIS GUY LIKES JSON
Fuck you and your unstructured garbage.
I’m sorry which LLM is this? What are its settings? How’d you get that out of it?
And how did it give sources?
I’m sorry which LLM is this?
It’s perplexity.ai. I like it because it doesn’t require an account and because it can search the internet. It’s like microsoft’s bing but slightly less cringe.
How’d you get that out of it?
The screenshot is fake. I used Inspect Element.
The answer is not real. The tool, on the other hand, is called Perplexity. It “understands” your question, searches the web, and gives you a summary, citing all the relevant sources.
It is very cool, specifically as a human readable mark down / data format.
The fact that you can make anything a tag and it’s going to be valid and you can nest stuff, is amazing.
But with a niche use case.
Clearly the tags waste space if you’re actually saving them all the time.
Good format to compress though…
