3 ms·

I'm sure others who have been around longer remember other examples, but in my life I have never before or since witnessed a media blitz for a "technical" stand

I'm sure others who have been around longer remember other examples, but in my life I have never before or since witnessed a media blitz for a "technical" standard as the coming out party for XML in the '90s. Almost overnight the book shelves, magazines (yes those were both things back then), and even TV news proclaimed the dawn of the new age. A wave incoherent mass insanity swept the industry with the promise that this sometimes white space sensitive text data format with all the deliberate under and over specifications that are hallmark traits of design by committee was literally going to solve every problem in software engineering, enterprise IT, and of course investing in the dot com dumpster fire (pre first collapse). The emperor never had any clothes. Disk space, network capacity, cpu time, sanity, dignity - mattered not. No problem could not be solved better with XML. Dissension was heretical. Any one else remember that?

dmichulke 11y ago
To this date I feel frustrated when I have to deal with a few pages of XML that could easily be a few lines of json. Then again, enterprises love it, so I can't complain too often or loud. Still, I often refer to it as XMHell and if you speak it fast enough, only the truly wise will understand and acknowledge it with a smile and a nod.
- conorgdaly 11y ago
  "a few pages of XML that could easily be a few lines of json" There is no sane way that you could represent "pages of XML" in "a few lines of JSON". Maybe the point you're trying to make is that you need just a handful of key:value pairs but whatever generates your config sees fit to do incredibly deep nesting...but that would be an issue with your application, not XML.
  - dmichulke 11y ago
    > There is no sane way that you could represent I think you're wrong, namely because of arrays. Can you tell me how you'd represent [1, 2, 3, 4] in xml? If you think this example is contrived, please compare the dependency sections of a clojure project.clj vs that of a Java pom.xml
wtbob 11y ago
> … in my life I have never before or since witnessed a media blitz for a "technical" standard as the coming out party for XML in the '90s. You don't remember the coming-out party for Java? It's really sad: we could have had Lisp and s-expressions; instead we ended up with Java & XML, and now we have JavaScript and JSON (which go from bad to better in terms of usability, but bad to worse in terms of safety and stability).

dmichulke 11y ago

To this date I feel frustrated when I have to deal with a few pages of XML that could easily be a few lines of json. Then again, enterprises love it, so I can't complain too often or loud. Still, I often refer to it as XMHell and if you speak it fast enough, only the truly wise will understand and acknowledge it with a smile and a nod.

conorgdaly 11y ago
"a few pages of XML that could easily be a few lines of json" There is no sane way that you could represent "pages of XML" in "a few lines of JSON". Maybe the point you're trying to make is that you need just a handful of key:value pairs but whatever generates your config sees fit to do incredibly deep nesting...but that would be an issue with your application, not XML.
- dmichulke 11y ago
  > There is no sane way that you could represent I think you're wrong, namely because of arrays. Can you tell me how you'd represent [1, 2, 3, 4] in xml? If you think this example is contrived, please compare the dependency sections of a clojure project.clj vs that of a Java pom.xml

wtbob 11y ago

> … in my life I have never before or since witnessed a media blitz for a "technical" standard as the coming out party for XML in the '90s. You don't remember the coming-out party for Java? It's really sad: we could have had Lisp and s-expressions; instead we ended up with Java & XML, and now we have JavaScript and JSON (which go from bad to better in terms of usability, but bad to worse in terms of safety and stability).