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It makes me grumpy. Even the self-ironic name "Yet ANOTHER mark-up lanuguage" is a set-up for disappointment. My personal belief is that XML was "good-enough"
by crispyambulance 7y ago
It makes me grumpy. Even the self-ironic name "Yet ANOTHER mark-up lanuguage" is a set-up for disappointment.
My personal belief is that XML was "good-enough" having been engineered for many use-cases and easy to comprehend for what it provides.
It's a tragedy that XML was abused so vigorously in the early naughts. People got so sick of it because they were compelled to edit XML manually in a text-editor with shitty to none schema support. It didn't help that the worst monstrosities of that era (soap and ws-* crap) heavily invested in turgid, badly designed XML.
I think that if there had been some more effort on tooling and good-practices, XML could have remained popular and we would not have had jason, yaml, and whatever awful thing is next.
- thinkloop 7y ago> XML could have remained popular and we would not have had jason One of the selling points of json is file size, xml started dying when people realized that more than half their bandwidth was going to xml structure rather than actual data
- reallydontask 7y agoThis is hardly an issue for server side config files or CI/CD config stuff.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Thiez 7y agoIs the difference in size really significant? When the files are small it doesn't matter much, and when they are large you can throw some compression in the mix. I've never heard filesize as an argument for json before.
- thinkloop 7y agoImagine a table of numbers, the xml would be 90% repeated header names and structure. Now multiply that by hundreds of little Ajax requests, it added up.
- rcxdude 7y agoI don't think it's just badly-designed XML that turned people off it. XML itself is just not very good for configuration: it's repetitive, there's no straightforward way of making a set of key-value pairs (just a long set of representations with different tradeoffs), and it's quite complex to parse and process because it has such an all-encompassing scope. I feel like XML is only really the right answer if you have something which resembles a document which you want to mark up, which is a tiny subset of what it is marketed and actually used for.
- montroser 7y agoNot that it's any better -- but for what it's worth, YAML is a recursive acronym for "YAML Ain't Markup Language"
- Lammy 7y agohttps://yaml.org/spec/history/2001-08-01.html https://yaml.org/spec/history/2001-08-01.html "Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) 1.0"
- montroser 7y agoInteresting that it originally had that even worse name. But also, I'm not wrong per the current version of the spec: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html "YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML™) Version 1.2"