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I also remember being excited about XML in the 90s and I can recall why. At the time, every application I used had its own bespoke file format and needed a cus
by rprospero 4y ago
I also remember being excited about XML in the 90s and I can recall why. At the time, every application I used had its own bespoke file format and needed a custom parser to read its output. This especially applied to several applications storing hierarchical information in CSV files with their own way of delimiting CSV data as content in a CSV cell. The switch to XML meant that I'd have to figure out the tag soup that the developer had chosen for their XML data, but that was so much more comfortable than figuring out the goulash of ASCII escape tags in the old format.
XML is like the pager. It might seem clunky today, but it's better than having to tell the baby-sitter the phone number for the restaurant and theatre you'd be visiting that night.
- syntheweave 4y agoThe interesting thing for me is that I've circled back to "CSV is good, actually" since for loosely structured source input, it has few equals - it lets you organize by cell, and you can use spreadsheet software to edit it. The balance shifts towards schema generation once you want to apply a specific model on the data, but "import CSV to my schema" is convenient as an interface to that. XML also has a place as an interface, but it's much more niche, since most interfaces that are hierarchical-document-shaped are going to parse text instead of bracketed entities. I think we got a bit excited about how well HTML worked at the time.
- apelapan 4y agoCSV is nice for tabular data. Especially if it is plain and straight forward in its nature. This covers a lot of use cases. For an object graph, CSV is less nice.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoany graph can be represented as the set of tuples representing the edges. and in fact this is the most flexible form. it depends on if you need it "human readable" or not, but a hierarchical/network representation of a graph is only one representation
- apelapan 4y agoYeah, it is perfectly possible, I just don't think it is very nice. Neither for parsing nor for human reading. If I need a file or network message to represent a handful of object types with a bunch of relations that form a graph, I prefer XML (or JSON).
- timeon 4y ago> XML meant that I'd have to figure out the tag soup that the developer had chosen for their XML data There was DTD for that but probably rarely used.