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XML isn't the problem. It would have been great if it had been introduced now, in a world totally comfortable with unstructured hash soups and trees and such.
by EamonnMR 4y ago
XML isn't the problem. It would have been great if it had been introduced now, in a world totally comfortable with unstructured hash soups and trees and such.
Trying to map it cleanly to a strongly typed world was the problem.
- dalyons 4y agoIf it was around now I still wouldn’t use it. It is the problem, it’s just not good as a data exchange format.
- EamonnMR 4y agoData exchange format? Yeah not great. I think it's got potential as a format for complicated text and markup heavy blobs though. The idea of using XML as HTML was... an idea, but rather than trying to rationalize it as a super complicated dtd, they should have instead opened it up and defined mechanisms for creating custom tags, sort of like how React works now. XML is great for applications where you might want to discard some or all of the data easily; shame the way it was employed required you to pretty explicitly handle every possible permutation of the data.