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XML is basically just a vastly inferior form of sexps, just as ASN.1 at least for the purposes of encoding cert info in TLS is vastly inferior to csexps -- the
by patrec 6y ago
XML is basically just a vastly inferior form of sexps, just as ASN.1 at least for the purposes of encoding cert info in TLS is vastly inferior to csexps -- the latter is canonical by design, efficient and trivial to write a robust parser for.
- acdha 6y agoIf this is so trivial, why has it not been done? It seems unlikely that nobody has ever heard of a common term.
- patrec 6y agoUhm, it has been done. Writing an obviously correct csexp serializer is literally 3 lines of code in a high level language and writing a deserializer is only slightly more LOCs (and yeah, I've used it in production for real stuff). If your model of the world is that because you don't know something it can't be vastly better than the stuff you know and that is widely used, you should consider refining that model. It's not how things work; sometimes fields take a wrong turn that is difficult to recover from or get swamped by morons who drive the good people out. A lot of what we have in 2020 would strike a smart practioner from half a century ago as shockingly braindead and outmoded and a lot would seem like scifi. XML is not a member of the scifi category.