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Around the time xml was released I asked a (smarter than me) friend what the hubbub was. And he got a pained look on his face and said. People think it'll solve

Around the time xml was released I asked a (smarter than me) friend what the hubbub was. And he got a pained look on his face and said. People think it'll solve a problem and it won't. His reasoning was the problem isn't standard file formats. It's turning those into something a program can operate on as data[1]. And XML does not do that for you. No you have suck it in and then manually transform it into 'data'. So it just moves the problem from one place to another place. Which is a trash solution usually. Far as I know JSON broken as it is does do that. At least with dynamic/ish languages. [1] gross stuff people used to do like copy data structures in memory directly to a file actually solves that problem while being a maintenance nightmare.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
> Far as I know JSON broken as it is does do that. JSON in scripting languages does "as well" as Java's java.io.ObjectInputStream/java.io.ObjectOutputStream and dontnet's System.Runtime.Serialization.XmlObjectSerializer. aka: will explode in your face in spetacular fashion [causing security vulnerabilities or denial of service in the way] unless you take special care to only use explicit safe serializable objects, and you handle corner cases correctly (for example, Javascript `__proto__` naive deserialization).
goto11 4y ago
I consider this a feature. XML specifies a data exchange format. How this is loaded into memory depends on your use case, language etc. You can use a DOM if this is appropriate or serialize into custom or native data structures. A browser rendering a web page will use different data structures than a crawler indexing a document.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  The problem is the schema and validation is the hard part and XML doesn't help with that at all.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - goto11 4y ago
    XML contains a scheme/validation language, the DTD. The hard part is getting independent parties to agree on a common data exchange format. Processing the data in code is the easy part.
kaba0 4y ago
Converting it to some object is not converting it to usable data. Anyone who tried to convert arbitrary json to python will know the struggle of `json[0][0][“root”]…`. This is also possible with xml and is similarly completely useless. At least the latter has tools around this fundamental problem.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago

> Far as I know JSON broken as it is does do that. JSON in scripting languages does "as well" as Java's java.io.ObjectInputStream/java.io.ObjectOutputStream and dontnet's System.Runtime.Serialization.XmlObjectSerializer. aka: will explode in your face in spetacular fashion [causing security vulnerabilities or denial of service in the way] unless you take special care to only use explicit safe serializable objects, and you handle corner cases correctly (for example, Javascript `__proto__` naive deserialization).

goto11 4y ago

I consider this a feature. XML specifies a data exchange format. How this is loaded into memory depends on your use case, language etc. You can use a DOM if this is appropriate or serialize into custom or native data structures. A browser rendering a web page will use different data structures than a crawler indexing a document.

Gibbon1 4y ago
The problem is the schema and validation is the hard part and XML doesn't help with that at all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- goto11 4y ago
  XML contains a scheme/validation language, the DTD. The hard part is getting independent parties to agree on a common data exchange format. Processing the data in code is the easy part.

kaba0 4y ago

Converting it to some object is not converting it to usable data. Anyone who tried to convert arbitrary json to python will know the struggle of `json[0][0][“root”]…`. This is also possible with xml and is similarly completely useless. At least the latter has tools around this fundamental problem.