5 ms·
> Almost anything XML is over-engineered. I hear this a lot, but I feel that with many XML protocols (including WebDAV), if you reformatted them as JSON, peopl
by jonas21 8y ago
> Almost anything XML is over-engineered.
I hear this a lot, but I feel that with many XML protocols (including WebDAV), if you reformatted them as JSON, people today would think they were pretty reasonable. XML was just the popular style back in the 90s / early 2000s.
- unilynx 8y agoAnd it surely beat the other common alternatives at the time for directory listings: raw /bin/ls like formats for FTP or a HTML dirindex for HTTP
- 0x0 8y agoDid it though? At least microsoft usually managed to parse ftp and html dirindexes. The bugs they had in their webdav clients (see link in parent post) was something else... incorrect/lacking xml entity handling that almost indicates substr'ing for "&" instead of using a real parser, and converting percent-escaped utf8 to percent-escaped latin1..?! You almost have to try to sabotage on purpose to get bugs like these.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoThe XML spec is just so complicated, with tag attributes, xsd, dtd, etc. Although it has nice capabilities, it can be tricky to map some random person's xml document to another data structure. But JSON seems like the pendulum just swung to its opposite apex