4 ms·

Love the vibe of artivles, which present let's say reason-driven development vs habit-driven. Why habit? Well, I can imagine back at the time OpenOffice was a

by kunley 3y ago

Love the vibe of artivles, which present let's say reason-driven development vs habit-driven. Why habit? Well, I can imagine back at the time OpenOffice was a fresh project, it went like this: "XML is going to stay forever and everybody uses XML, so ofc we use one... oh, it is so big! And there are many files, so we just zip'em"... To be fair, the author of this excellent article doesn't even say about getting rid of XML in this format- but that could also be achieved by storing stuff in a SQLite file. Usage of XML was habitual thinking there- and not very visionary, as the format is dead now...

tpm 3y ago
> Well, I can imagine back at the time OpenOffice was a fresh project OpenOffice was born when Sun bought StarOffice, which was initially released in 1985 (on Z80 and certainly without any XML). So the project itself was far from fresh. OpenDocument was developed from OpenOffice.org XML format which was developed after Sun bought StarOffice in 1999. At the time XML was not used everywhere, but it was very much in vogue, certainly at Sun where the official line was that Java (created at Sun) and XML are going to conquer the world.
galangalalgol 3y ago
Could you clarify the "XML is dead" comment? Don't all the major document formats still use zipped xml? I had to interface with an xml format recently, and that isn't something I ever did, and when I went looking for a crate that parses an xml schema I kept running across this whole xml is dead thing. But it still seems to be everywhere.
- kortex 3y ago
  Not GP, but I believe the "XML is dead" sentiment stems from the observation that very few greenfield applications are deliberately choosing xml. Sure you have legacy giants like (X)HTML, SVG, office formats, etc, but you'd be hard-pressed to convince developers (especially a younger crowd) to select it as a data format. It's seen as warty, cumbersome, unwieldy, verbose.

by kunley 3y ago

tpm 3y ago

> Well, I can imagine back at the time OpenOffice was a fresh project OpenOffice was born when Sun bought StarOffice, which was initially released in 1985 (on Z80 and certainly without any XML). So the project itself was far from fresh. OpenDocument was developed from OpenOffice.org XML format which was developed after Sun bought StarOffice in 1999. At the time XML was not used everywhere, but it was very much in vogue, certainly at Sun where the official line was that Java (created at Sun) and XML are going to conquer the world.

galangalalgol 3y ago

Could you clarify the "XML is dead" comment? Don't all the major document formats still use zipped xml? I had to interface with an xml format recently, and that isn't something I ever did, and when I went looking for a crate that parses an xml schema I kept running across this whole xml is dead thing. But it still seems to be everywhere.

kortex 3y ago
Not GP, but I believe the "XML is dead" sentiment stems from the observation that very few greenfield applications are deliberately choosing xml. Sure you have legacy giants like (X)HTML, SVG, office formats, etc, but you'd be hard-pressed to convince developers (especially a younger crowd) to select it as a data format. It's seen as warty, cumbersome, unwieldy, verbose.