3 ms·
The counterpoint here is that a lot of the success of JSON was in presenting an alternative to the then-state-of-the-art, which was basically "here's a small mo
by ubernostrum 8y ago
The counterpoint here is that a lot of the success of JSON was in presenting an alternative to the then-state-of-the-art, which was basically "here's a small mountain of spec documents explaining how you need at least fifty megabytes of metadata spread out over forty-three separate namespaces' worth of elements to safely send a single string key to someone else with XML".
And at the time people insisted JSON could never replace that, because JSON was so underspecified and unsafe. You could maybe get away with it for a couple requests to your puny baby child's "Fisher-Price My First Webservice" toy program, but JSON would instantly and completely fall over the instant any real-world problem presented itself.
Yet here we are all those years later, in a world which largely runs on JSON as a data interchange format.
Or, more concisely, as I wrote in 2006 in response to the Dave Winer piece someone else linked in another comment:
And now here are these kids with their startup companies and their weblogs who are getting data exchange and even things that kind of look like APIs out of… JavaScript arrays? The XML guys are sitting up on the mountaintop like the Grinch, with his pile of stolen presents, wondering how Christmas still managed to happen: it came without specs! It came without hype! It came without angle brackets, envelopes or types!
- hguhghuff 8y agoThere’s passion for you.
- donmatito 8y agoOr, "worse is better"
- majewsky 8y agoNot really. There sure are some warts and inconsistencies in implementations (and across specs), but the success is because of the limited complexity. It's more "perfection is achieved not when there is nothing to add but when there is nothing left to take away" than "worse is better".
- acdha 8y agoWorse is highly subjective: the XML world spent millions of dollars layering on huge amounts of complexity but never made a corresponding investment in having common tools not suck. Things like validation and schemas still have a horrible user experience and then you have things like libxml2 meaning that most of the world can’t use XSLT or XPath features added a decade ago. Similarly, it’s been notoriously hard to find things in the XML world which have quality documentation, examples, or working validators — doubly unfortunate given the complexity of what they expect users to do. If you have a job to do, JSON is just plain better on almost every count. I remember being excited by XML 1.0 back in the 90s but the fall in popularity is something lots of people worked hard to accomplish by building so many new, more complex things rather than fixing the foundation. The assumption that users will have to learn your standard is almost always wrong.
- smdyc1 8y agoYep. I'm reasonably new to software development, and I've always found JSON is simple yet effective. Less so for XML. It has its place, but I think less so for a simple and reliable data interchange format.