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> It had hilariously little to do with XML Er, it had everything to do with XML. It was introduced to give pages the possibility to fetch XML (typically feeds)
by toyg 3y ago
> It had hilariously little to do with XML
Er, it had everything to do with XML. It was introduced to give pages the possibility to fetch XML (typically feeds) and render their content dynamically; which is basically what it ended up being used for, except XML feeds were then replaced by simpler files.
- cabalamat 3y ago> except XML feeds were then replaced by simpler files Yes. XML was basically superceded by JSON, which was far less verbose and clunky.
- oaiey 3y agoXML in XMLHttpRequest was first superseded by HTML and then by JSON. And JSON only because the JavaScript API for XML (aka. the DOM API) is the worst thing imaginable compared to the simplicity offered by JSON.parse and then the JS native representation of it as objects. The same ugly DOM API let to the advent and rule of jQuery. The success of JSON has less to do with verbose/clunkiness but a lot with the available APIs in the JavaScript frontend.
- johannes1234321 3y ago> compared to the simplicity offered by JSON.parse JSON.parse() came a lot later. People started with eval(), which lead to quite some problems (executing code returned from some third party service, what could go wrong ....) and then various other attempts at parsing.
- kentbrew 3y agoI was curious about this so I looked it up. We didn't have JSON.parse and JSON.stringify in place worldwide until fourteen years later. Horrible times. https://caniuse.com/?search=JSON https://caniuse.com/?search=JSON