2 ms·

> Browsers may have XML parsers built in, but XML requires APIs to work with in any meaningful way. But this format will require parsers to take the resulting

> Browsers may have XML parsers built in, but XML requires APIs to work with in any meaningful way. But this format will require parsers to take the resulting objects, arrays, and numbers and reconstruct something very close to XML's data model anyway. > XML's data model is complex. So is this document format. With it's special "_type" keys and specially named nodes. XML is simpler since attributes and children are a native part of the format and the API. > There's huge value in your document model also being your in-memory model. Are you suggesting this exact model be the in-memory model? Because that would be pretty non-optimal. You'd likely want your in-memory model to be more powerful than a tree of dictionaries, arrays, and strings. Therefore parsing and storing an XML document on load/save is not a big deal. In fact, given the existence of an API that already handles attributes and nested nodes, it might even be easier. > XML has a specific formalized data model of elements, attributes and so on, but this is just a graph representation: You can lossly encode an XML DOM in JSON, and vice versa. Exactly. So why use a format that it obviously terrible for mixed text and markup? For any reasonable sized document in JSON will be impossible to follow yet XML would be comparatively straight forward. > There's a reason we're using JSON over REST instead of SOAP. XML isn't the lingua franca of the web that W3C seemed to assume it would be during the early 2000s; JavaScript/JSON is. Basically SOAP is an over-engineered solution to web RDP. It started out as XML-RPC which was far simpler and far more constrained like JSON. You could easily encode SOAP in JSON if you wanted. You're blaming the underlying technology for when it's used inappropriately but this is an example of JSON being used inappropriately! It's an over-engineered solution to a problem solved simpler by a different technology. "XML bad / JSON good" doesn't tell the whole story.

kilburn 8y ago
> Are you suggesting this exact model be the in-memory model? Because that would be pretty non-optimal. You'd likely want your in-memory model to be more powerful than a tree of dictionaries, arrays, and strings. I'm pretty confident that this is actually the intended goal, particularly for web-based editors. Most "modern" web-based rich text editors work with an internal schema similar to this one, even when most of them support html/xml import/export too. In today's web ecosystem, it is hard to do much better than "javascript structure that gets diff-rendered to the DOM by a patching algorithm on updates". I think this is just a case of someone saying "hey, wouldn't it be great if all these editors used the same schema instead of very similar ones with minor differences?"
atombender 8y ago
> Are you suggesting this exact model be the in-memory model? The data model, yes, though not the visual model. Sanity [1], which uses this specification, uses it for its rich text content. Sanity is a document store with a collaborative, real-time editing UI similar to Airtable, but self-hosted and open source. When you're editing some text in the rich-text editor (which uses ProseMirror internally, last I checked), the editor is working directly on this data model, and produces patches against this data model that get synced with other clients. Similar to OT, except it uses a simpler git-like approach to rebase patches and converge the state. There's another, less obvious reason it's JSON. In Sanity's document store, every document is a structured object that is read and written as JSON. Inside each document, Portable Text fields are also stored as JSON, not as a string or a binary blob. This content also is indexed and queryable. For example, let's say you're creating a wiki app; each wiki page is a document, with a title, body, and so on. The body is a Portable Text field. With this, you can find all wiki pages that link to another wiki page by running a query such as *[references("richard-feynman")]. You can do things like extract images, get the first paragraph, etc., all using the query language. All technically possible with XML, of course, though I personally wouldn't want to go there. (Disclosure: I work on Sanity's content store tech, but I don't work on Sanity itself.) [1] https://www.sanity.io https://www.sanity.io

kilburn 8y ago

> Are you suggesting this exact model be the in-memory model? Because that would be pretty non-optimal. You'd likely want your in-memory model to be more powerful than a tree of dictionaries, arrays, and strings. I'm pretty confident that this is actually the intended goal, particularly for web-based editors. Most "modern" web-based rich text editors work with an internal schema similar to this one, even when most of them support html/xml import/export too. In today's web ecosystem, it is hard to do much better than "javascript structure that gets diff-rendered to the DOM by a patching algorithm on updates". I think this is just a case of someone saying "hey, wouldn't it be great if all these editors used the same schema instead of very similar ones with minor differences?"

atombender 8y ago

> Are you suggesting this exact model be the in-memory model? The data model, yes, though not the visual model. Sanity [1], which uses this specification, uses it for its rich text content. Sanity is a document store with a collaborative, real-time editing UI similar to Airtable, but self-hosted and open source. When you're editing some text in the rich-text editor (which uses ProseMirror internally, last I checked), the editor is working directly on this data model, and produces patches against this data model that get synced with other clients. Similar to OT, except it uses a simpler git-like approach to rebase patches and converge the state. There's another, less obvious reason it's JSON. In Sanity's document store, every document is a structured object that is read and written as JSON. Inside each document, Portable Text fields are also stored as JSON, not as a string or a binary blob. This content also is indexed and queryable. For example, let's say you're creating a wiki app; each wiki page is a document, with a title, body, and so on. The body is a Portable Text field. With this, you can find all wiki pages that link to another wiki page by running a query such as *[references("richard-feynman")]. You can do things like extract images, get the first paragraph, etc., all using the query language. All technically possible with XML, of course, though I personally wouldn't want to go there. (Disclosure: I work on Sanity's content store tech, but I don't work on Sanity itself.) [1] https://www.sanity.io https://www.sanity.io