4 ms·
Ok, but like what if your metadata is even more complicated than just a single field, it’s ridiculous to have to include even more opening and closing tags. <m
by mlazos 8y ago
Ok, but like what if your metadata is even more complicated than just a single field, it’s ridiculous to have to include even more opening and closing tags.
<map>
<kvp>
<key>k</key>
<value>v</key>
<metadata>
<field1>m</field1>
<field2>m2</field2>
</metadata>
</kvp>
</map>
It’s just crazy to look at tbh, and it was annoying to type on my phone. I’m amazed people are still arguing in favor of it. In reality you just want the markup to transmit the most information in the least amount of bits. This is a measurable quantity and xml objectively sucks at it.
- int_19h 7y ago> In reality you just want the markup to transmit the most information in the least amount of bits. If that were the case, we'd be using binary serialization everywhere. But you yourself are making an argument that ease of writing matters. So does ease of reading. Overly verbose markup is a tax on both, but so is extreme brevity. Anyway, this particular thread was a discussion to address a very specific point made in the article that overstated XML verbosity over JSON. I'm not actually arguing that XML is perfect, or even "good enough". Its syntax is overly verbose, and its data model has pointless distinctions and arbitrary restrictions. But it also had many good ideas, and it's unfortunate that those get ignored in the quest of simplifying everything - and then later, when the issues that were the original motivation for those ideas are rediscovered, that wheel gets reinvented in dozens of flawed and mutually incompatible ways.