5 ms·

XML Backlash?

20 points by 13ren 18y ago

ComputerGuru 18y ago
It's not as dramatic as the article makes it seem. XML is and was a great solution far a huge number of things. Overexcited developers were tad too eager to put it to use for things outside its true scope (regardless of what it was marketed as), and now they're realizing that there are better alternatives for those particular applications. XML was and still remains an excellent solution for the problem it originally solved: a joint human and machine readable markup language.
- ajross 18y ago
  Uh... a tad too eager? Dude, we crossed that threshold with Ant or JSP. By the time XSLT and XQuery rolled around, we were looking at a full-on stampede of developer group-think. XSLT happens to be my pet peeve. I simply can't understand how anyone would have ever looked at that problem ("how to turn a source data document into a presentation format" -- something that has been solved sanely a thousand times by obscure technologies like "scripts", or "PHP") and decided that the best way to handle it was a turing-complete pattern matching language written in XML itself! I mean, it looks more like a torture device than a programming language...
  - bct 18y ago
    I know that it's perverse, but XSLT's actually kind of fun if you're not doing anything terribly complex.
    - thwarted 18y ago
      So you're saying that XSLT makes the simple things fun and the complex things terrible?
      - bct 18y ago
        Pretty much. It's certainly more fun than DOM for simple transformations.
  - 13ren 18y ago
    Yes, XSLT written in XML itself is abominable. It's easier to read if the program and data have different formats (lisp notwithstanding...). But it's escaping less-than signs that got really me: (i < 5). But transforming trees with a functional programming approach (not PHP) is a natural fit.
dissenter 18y ago
XML is an embarrassment. It solves no problem: not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data. The only thing it does is give programmers something recognizable to fiddle with, however irrelevant to the problem it may be. Most religious wars in computer science hinge on matters of taste. If you prefer emacs to vi, maybe that's just your style. If you prefer PHP to Ruby, there may be several good reasons why. There is no such ambiguity in the case of XML. If you prefer XML to anything but XML, you don't know what you're talking about. You should have no say in anything that affects other programmers. We're in this mess because of the unforeseen popularity of the web. When the web was created, its designers chose a simple and not particularly good markup language. Then the web grew, and instead of everybody recognizing the language as bad and replacing it, we turned a blind eye to its faults and kept it around. The immense popularity of the web has glossed over all the deficiencies present in markup languages. People can't imagine that anything that built the internet might have something wrong with it. The internet is good, so anything that built the internet must be good as well. Markup language was ill-conceived. Generalizing it into XML was folly. How can you possibly take XML seriously? How do you squeeze an entire blog post out of it? Have you never bothered to look at the technology? The author is obviously capable of writing a coherent, well-thought out essay. Did he never stop and look at what he was doing and go, "This is a whole lot of shit!"
- utnick 18y ago
  Maybe I am missing something, but I think thats a little extreme... If I have some data structures that I am trying to send from my C# windows app to your java unix app, how would you propose we do that? With XML, we can easily agree and collaborate on a format and both of our languages have builtin libraries to extract the data we need. Its easy to build and easy to debug.
  - ajross 18y ago
    Yes. The fact that XML parsers are pervasive is a good thing, and an advantage for XML as a technology. But it says absolutely nothing about XML as a metadata format. A standard parser suite for anything would have the same advantages. Note also that there are other technologies with pervasively available parsers, like JSON, which don't share any of XML's warts.
michaelneale 18y ago
XML is popular simply because HTML made the web happen. XML looked like HTML so people understood what it was for immediately, and then it got overused. Thats about all there is to it.

20 points by 13ren 18y ago

It's not as dramatic as the article makes it seem. XML is and was a great solution far a huge number of things. Overexcited developers were tad too eager to put it to use for things outside its true scope (regardless of what it was marketed as), and now they're realizing that there are better alternatives for those particular applications. XML was and still remains an excellent solution for the problem it originally solved: a joint human and machine readable markup language.

ajross 18y ago
Uh... a tad too eager? Dude, we crossed that threshold with Ant or JSP. By the time XSLT and XQuery rolled around, we were looking at a full-on stampede of developer group-think. XSLT happens to be my pet peeve. I simply can't understand how anyone would have ever looked at that problem ("how to turn a source data document into a presentation format" -- something that has been solved sanely a thousand times by obscure technologies like "scripts", or "PHP") and decided that the best way to handle it was a turing-complete pattern matching language written in XML itself! I mean, it looks more like a torture device than a programming language...
- bct 18y ago
  I know that it's perverse, but XSLT's actually kind of fun if you're not doing anything terribly complex.
  - thwarted 18y ago
    So you're saying that XSLT makes the simple things fun and the complex things terrible?
    - bct 18y ago
      Pretty much. It's certainly more fun than DOM for simple transformations.
- 13ren 18y ago
  Yes, XSLT written in XML itself is abominable. It's easier to read if the program and data have different formats (lisp notwithstanding...). But it's escaping less-than signs that got really me: (i < 5). But transforming trees with a functional programming approach (not PHP) is a natural fit.

dissenter 18y ago

XML is an embarrassment. It solves no problem: not even the problem of agreeing on how to represent data. The only thing it does is give programmers something recognizable to fiddle with, however irrelevant to the problem it may be. Most religious wars in computer science hinge on matters of taste. If you prefer emacs to vi, maybe that's just your style. If you prefer PHP to Ruby, there may be several good reasons why. There is no such ambiguity in the case of XML. If you prefer XML to anything but XML, you don't know what you're talking about. You should have no say in anything that affects other programmers. We're in this mess because of the unforeseen popularity of the web. When the web was created, its designers chose a simple and not particularly good markup language. Then the web grew, and instead of everybody recognizing the language as bad and replacing it, we turned a blind eye to its faults and kept it around. The immense popularity of the web has glossed over all the deficiencies present in markup languages. People can't imagine that anything that built the internet might have something wrong with it. The internet is good, so anything that built the internet must be good as well. Markup language was ill-conceived. Generalizing it into XML was folly. How can you possibly take XML seriously? How do you squeeze an entire blog post out of it? Have you never bothered to look at the technology? The author is obviously capable of writing a coherent, well-thought out essay. Did he never stop and look at what he was doing and go, "This is a whole lot of shit!"

utnick 18y ago
Maybe I am missing something, but I think thats a little extreme... If I have some data structures that I am trying to send from my C# windows app to your java unix app, how would you propose we do that? With XML, we can easily agree and collaborate on a format and both of our languages have builtin libraries to extract the data we need. Its easy to build and easy to debug.
- ajross 18y ago
  Yes. The fact that XML parsers are pervasive is a good thing, and an advantage for XML as a technology. But it says absolutely nothing about XML as a metadata format. A standard parser suite for anything would have the same advantages. Note also that there are other technologies with pervasively available parsers, like JSON, which don't share any of XML's warts.

michaelneale 18y ago

XML is popular simply because HTML made the web happen. XML looked like HTML so people understood what it was for immediately, and then it got overused. Thats about all there is to it.