3 ms·

XML is in that odd middle-ground where it's usually human-readable, but also a huge pain in the ass to write. It's great at what it was intended for, as a data

by TillE 8y ago

XML is in that odd middle-ground where it's usually human-readable, but also a huge pain in the ass to write. It's great at what it was intended for, as a data interchange format. For a general-purpose human-writable structured data format, I guess the ugly nonstandard hack that is "JSON with comments" is probably good. It's certainly faster to parse than YAML.

dagw 8y ago
I've managed to teach non-programmers to successfully edit YAML files without too much trouble, but most non-programmers have a really hard time consistently producing valid JSON by hand. As much as there is a lot to not like about YAML, it is the easiest one for humans to consistently write in my experience.
- jodrellblank 8y ago
  But why should they have to do it by hand? We don't judge Excel and Librecalc by how easy it is to open their files and produce valid spreadsheets without good tooling. If they're working with structured data, why can't they use tools/editors which work with the structure, reveal it, and enforce it?
tannhaeuser 8y ago
XML wasn't intended as data interchange format, but for replacing SGML as serialization and markup meta-language on the Web (eg. for XHTML, SVG, MathML). It can't be said often enough that markup languages are for authoring and delivering semistructured text data, not for general-purpose data serialization. As in, editing plain text files and have your text treated as content unless marked up with markup and annotated with metadata attributes. Though this is much more pronounced in SGML which also contains the features for authoring (as opposed to delivery) omitted from XML such as tag omission/inference, custom Wiki syntaxes, and other short forms.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
  Well, what is the purpose of markup languages? Isn't the sole purpose of markup is to be able to process the marked-up content with a computer? Why would you add markup to your favorite verse if it wasn't to somehow feed it to machine for some purpose (analyze, typeset, etc.)? So when we have text with markup the text part is meant to be there for humans and the markup part is solely for computers. Now let's remove all text; now there's no content for humans at all, only for computers. How is this different from general-purpose data serialization? (Some of the samples you give, like SVG, may not have any text content at all; it's basically a drawing language.) Given that XML ecosystem has quite a few tools (e.g. several type description languages or a declarative data transformation language just to name a few) it's a very good general-purpose data serialization format.
slavik81 8y ago
> It's great at what it was intended for, as a data interchange format. XML's incredible verbosity is a problem for computers too. I've spent time performance-tuning message parsing code that had no good reason to be slow except that our use of XML bloated the data and decoding time by an order of magnitude or more compared to a binary protocol with a schema.
- zaphar 8y ago
  In my experience if you are using XML as a data interchange format and it's slow it's probably because you are using a DOM parser instead of a SAX parser. DOM parsers build a tree that is best used describing a marked up document and much less useful for describing a data structure you might want to serialize or deserialize. I've gotten incredible speedups just by switching to SAX parsing in those cases.

by TillE 8y ago

dagw 8y ago

I've managed to teach non-programmers to successfully edit YAML files without too much trouble, but most non-programmers have a really hard time consistently producing valid JSON by hand. As much as there is a lot to not like about YAML, it is the easiest one for humans to consistently write in my experience.

jodrellblank 8y ago
But why should they have to do it by hand? We don't judge Excel and Librecalc by how easy it is to open their files and produce valid spreadsheets without good tooling. If they're working with structured data, why can't they use tools/editors which work with the structure, reveal it, and enforce it?

tannhaeuser 8y ago

XML wasn't intended as data interchange format, but for replacing SGML as serialization and markup meta-language on the Web (eg. for XHTML, SVG, MathML). It can't be said often enough that markup languages are for authoring and delivering semistructured text data, not for general-purpose data serialization. As in, editing plain text files and have your text treated as content unless marked up with markup and annotated with metadata attributes. Though this is much more pronounced in SGML which also contains the features for authoring (as opposed to delivery) omitted from XML such as tag omission/inference, custom Wiki syntaxes, and other short forms.

Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
Well, what is the purpose of markup languages? Isn't the sole purpose of markup is to be able to process the marked-up content with a computer? Why would you add markup to your favorite verse if it wasn't to somehow feed it to machine for some purpose (analyze, typeset, etc.)? So when we have text with markup the text part is meant to be there for humans and the markup part is solely for computers. Now let's remove all text; now there's no content for humans at all, only for computers. How is this different from general-purpose data serialization? (Some of the samples you give, like SVG, may not have any text content at all; it's basically a drawing language.) Given that XML ecosystem has quite a few tools (e.g. several type description languages or a declarative data transformation language just to name a few) it's a very good general-purpose data serialization format.

slavik81 8y ago

> It's great at what it was intended for, as a data interchange format. XML's incredible verbosity is a problem for computers too. I've spent time performance-tuning message parsing code that had no good reason to be slow except that our use of XML bloated the data and decoding time by an order of magnitude or more compared to a binary protocol with a schema.

zaphar 8y ago
In my experience if you are using XML as a data interchange format and it's slow it's probably because you are using a DOM parser instead of a SAX parser. DOM parsers build a tree that is best used describing a marked up document and much less useful for describing a data structure you might want to serialize or deserialize. I've gotten incredible speedups just by switching to SAX parsing in those cases.