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Erik Naggum's XML Rant from 2002: Disturbingly prescient

86 points by batista 15y ago

batista 15y ago
Especially the part around 2/3rds of the text, about how to improve XML. Also loved the jokes and metaphors. We need such people in tech discussions, most community leaders have turned teletubbies-nice to each other, to the detriment not only of a good flame-fight, but of the actual dismissal of brain dead ideas. Instead of violently ridiculing proponents of bad ideas/software/etc to shame and (hopefully) sepuku, we tip-toe around them, or at best, just make light fun of them, like in the "Mongo is webscale" video.
- rollypolly 15y ago
  My favorite: Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes. One of the many reasons I love json.
  - jebblue 15y ago
    XML and HTML are derivatives of SGML. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Sources http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html I can't imagine HTML without attributes: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html
- rpeden 15y ago
  I agree with you, and don't mind someone being blunt when they believe they're right and mainstream views are wrong, even when I disagree with the argument the person is making. It often seems to result in a strong reaction in the opposite direction, however. I was amused when I read Ted Dziuba's "Node.js is Cancer" rant, and was able to separate the technical arguments from the invective and evaluate them on their merit. A lot of people, though, seemed to respond angrily with indignant forum or blog posts. So I suppose there's always the danger that being too blunt will result in your real message being lost in the resulting firestorm.
  - frou_dh 15y ago
    Dziuba's post has ended up the 3rd result on Google for node.js. Mission accomplished, I'm sure!
- olavk 15y ago
  I think rants like these makes us more stupid. It turns a discussion about pros and cons of various technologies into pissing matches. His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand, but only serves to set up "studid" versus "smart" and appeals to emotion by hoping to convince the reader to the side of the smart ones, without actually arguing the specific points of the thechnology. (E.g. why is backslash obviously better than ampersand-semicolon as character escapes? If he have a valid argument for this he certainly does't feel the need to disclose the reason for the reader. He would rather make an elaborate infantilization analogy about breasts.) I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need to feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools may have various pros and cons in different specific situations.
  - batista 15y ago
    >His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand I think quite the opposite, he makes a very compelling case, and even gets into the details. Even in the part you mention, for example you missed some stuff that answers your question (without hand-holding): = = = Then, remove the obnoxious character entities and escape special characters with _a single character_, like \, and _name other entities with letters following the same character_. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols, _discover Unicode_. = = = >I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools have pros and cons in specific situations. It's not about "different tools have pros and cons in specific situations", it's about how some tools have defects that make them bad for EVERY SINGLE situation. CORBA comes to mind as another example. It's not that something XML-like cannot be good for certain situations. It's rather that XML as-it-was-designed has several flaws that don't NEED to be there, and don't benefit ANY use case. For example, goto has some use cases in C that it is good for. NULL terminated strings on the other hand are a bad idea, and have no place anywhere.
    - sixbrx 15y ago
      The parts you quoted between === from the article aren't at all a compelling case to me, that's nothing more than a prescription. If he has some argument here, he needs to make it.
- cygx 15y ago
  Also loved the jokes and metaphors. I did not: He tried to be clever, but only succeeded in looking like an asshole. The technical criticism may have merit, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired. We need such people in tech discussions I don't. Thankfully, it's easy to ignore people on the internet.
pwpwp 15y ago
Naggum's the name.
crazygringo 15y ago
> (I note in passing that the stereotypical American male longs for much larger than natural female breasts, presumably to maintain the proportion to his own size from his infancy, which has caused the stereotypical American female to feel a need for breasts that will give the next generation a demand for even more disproportionally large breasts.) Is this how Norwegians see Americans?!
- arthur_debert 15y ago
  This is how much of the world see Americans
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- golden_apples 15y ago
  Given that breastfeeding has been declining in America over the past couple generations, it reflects a misunderstanding of American sexual pathology, if, in fact, it was meant as more than a throwaway comment.
- batista 15y ago
  No, this is how European psychologists/psychoanalysis guys in general see Americans. As a general notion it's not that far for the truth, if you ask me, even if the casual mechanism to explain it is wrong.
mindstab 15y ago
And that's how we seem to have transitioned to JSON, at least for some information storage and transition :) Remember when it was all the rage to use XML for RPC? and even in AJAX?
- benwr 15y ago
  Hard to forget, given that you have to type "XMLHttpRequest" every time you do any AJAX (The 'X' in which stands for XML, iirc).
  - mindstab 15y ago
    haha ah right! Excellent (and tragic) example! I've been using jQuery too much at work and been spoilt by $.get() ;)
  - batista 15y ago
    No you don't, since 99% of the time you'd use some library for that, like jQuery.
- TeeWEE 15y ago
  JSON and XML have two totally different application domains. For some XML is better for some JSON. People who think JSON is better never had a problem with changing data schemas, different parties and common interface. In short XML is a lot more powerful than simple JSON. JSON is a subset of XML with a different syntax.
  - DavidAbrams 15y ago
    How is XML any more immune to schema changes?
    - rickette 15y ago
      Is not immune, but you have an explicit contract in the form of a XML Schema Definition (XSD).
6ren 15y ago
> ...go for a binary representation. ... The question of what we humans need to read and write no longer has any bearing on what the computers need to work with. We seem to be heading away from binary. I think the bigger problem with XML is the XML stack. Many of the ideas are insightful, powerful, useful - but the embodiments are tedious (e.g. XML Schema, XSLT). OTOH, a problem is an opportunity
dhconnelly 15y ago
The title of this post should be "how not to disagree with others in a public forum". The tone is alienating and disrespectful, so much so that the valid criticisms of XML as a technology are completely buried by the arrogance and off-topic political and social commentary: "the current American presidency and XML have much in common", "XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." If we want computing to be a friendly and welcoming field and contribute to the betterment of humanity, we can't tolerate people who behave like this in public.
- ScottBurson 15y ago
  I think the worst of it was Naggum's utter conviction of his own moral superiority... at the same time he was gleefully dumping shit on others. He's dead, BTW. Although he was smart and sometimes made good points, I do not miss him.
  - batista 15y ago
    >I think the worst of it was Naggum's utter conviction of his own moral superiority... at the same time he was gleefully dumping shit on others. How is that "the worst"? One's feeling of moral superiority and dumping shit on others are not contradictory --except if one's conviction of his moral superiority is wrong. Dumping shit on others does not make you morally inferior (in the same way that they could be), if that's what you suggest. If one is bad-mouthing some rapist, it doesn't mean that he's as morally bad as the rapist because of doing so. That said, all this "moral" thing is beside the point: what Naggun was utterly convicted of was his _technical_ correctness, which is something completely different.
    - pwpwp 15y ago
      Can you please stop calling him Naggun?
      - batista 15y ago
        Well, if everybody understands that I refer to Naggum, where's the problem? (That's essentially the argument of the "omit semicolons / pro ASI" people -- since browsers grok it, where's the problem with abusing an error checking mechanism with our syntax?) That said, what is it to you? I thought that was his name, probably because phonetically it sounds better in my language, so I misspelled it 2-3 times. Only know I found out it is Naggum. It's not like I did it on purpose, or that I would continue doing it if I knew better, so I find your request absurd.
raverbashing 15y ago
Yes, it's a rant. Why? Because probably the author is tired of explaining the same things over and over to the XML defenders Really JSON is better (and XML is crap) it's ridiculous, it's obvious, it's clear cut, and when people "don't get it" you start resorting to irony Like this: > Enclose the /element/ in matching delimiters, not the tag Let's compare them <blah>foo</blah> To json blah: foo 1 - size (json wins) 2 - matching. Here's an exercise, try splitting json with sed, and then try with XML. Sed is a good exercise, because it's limited to simple grammars, so it kind of gives an idea how much trouble it is to parse each one 3 - redundancy: what would mean if the line was <blah>foo</lala> This is a mistake, right? But I can assume the tag name is blah and the data is foo. This is a glaring redundancy in grammar, bound to cause trouble. Not to mention working with json data (like python) is natural compared to work with XML data.
- olavk 15y ago
  Now try to apply this to the real world. The most popular and widely used SGML-derived format by far is (X)HTML. Show me e.g. how a paragraph with a few embedded links is improved by translating to JSON. It is not. Of course some kinds of data are indeed expressed simpler with JSON. Another real world example is RSS. More data-y that HTML but still may contain mixed content. Would it be better if it had been JSON from the beginning? The answer is not clear cut. So maybe JSON is not always the right answer. Maybe it depends on what kind of data you want to express. But then it suddely is not a debate with a "XML-defenders" which "dont get it". Then it is a discussion about which tool is approprite in a given situation rather than a war between tribes. And how do you boost you ego and sense of superiority with a boring debate about tools?
  - raverbashing 15y ago
    Popular != Better "Show me e.g. how a paragraph with a few embedded links is improved by translating to JSON." Even though HTML and XML are related, something like a web page is so ingrained that would be difficult to change And JSON was never a markup language The criticism of XML goes much more towards using it as a 'Key/Value' serialization format. But you could imagine something like that (commas and colons would have to be replaced in a 'JSON' markup language) {p: Read it on {href:news.ycombinator.com, a:Hacker News}} Size gains, parsing speed gains. RSS is not as clear cut, really, it's not a complicated structure, so it could be YAML for example "So maybe JSON is not always the right answer. Maybe it depends on what kind of data you want to express" XML has attributes, which I'm not against (unlike the article) and it has a more natural nesting of information. But for the majority of data, yes, JSON is better This is about coder productivity (which is increased with JSON it's not even funny), either in Python/Java (even with the whole swiss army knife of XML libs they have)/C# or others. Speed is also a issue. Encoding and decoding XML is slower, even with C speedups (example: Python lxml). And this is relevant for transformation of data or even sending it to the user.
sciurus 15y ago
The heart of his suggestions: Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes. (You will then find that you do not need them at all.) Enclose the /element/ in matching delimiters, not the tag. These simple things makes people think differently about how they use the language. Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes. Next, introduce macros that look exactly like elements, but that are expanded in place between the reader and the "object model". Then, remove the obnoxious character entities and escape special characters with a single character, like \, and name other entities with letters following the same character. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols, discover Unicode. Finally, introduce a language for micro-parsers than can take more convenient syntaxes for commonly used elements with complex structure and make them /return/ element structures more suitable for processing on the receiving end, and which would also make validation something useful. The overly simple regular expression look-alike was a good idea when processing was expensive and made all decisions at the start-tag, but with a DOM and less stream-like processing, a much better language should be specified that could also do serious computation before validating a document -- so that once again processing could become cheaper because of the "markup", not more expensive because of it. But the one thing I would change the most from a markup language suitable for marking up the incidental instruction to a type-setter to the data representation language suitable for the "market" that XML wants, is to go for a binary representation.
- olavk 15y ago
  He basically suggest turning XML into s-expressions. Eg. <p>Hello, <a href="http://example.com">world</p> Turns into something like: <p "Hello," <a <href "http://example.com">"world">> Not an obvious win as far as I can tell, wouldn't like to fix an ummatched bracket in a document ending in >>>> rather than e.g. </form><div></body></html>. But your mileage may vary. His other ideas have more or less been implemented, with varying success. XML-Schemas have been introduced which is more powerful that DTD's. Some schema languages can indeed do complex computations for better or worse. The macro-expansion approach is how XSL-formatting worked, and it turned out it was not as powerful or elegant as the CSS approach. It made sense when coming from a publishing background, but didn't predict dynamic interactive web pages.
moron 15y ago
The parts of this that aren't about XML are stupid as hell.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  While I generally dislike comments like this (and I wouldn't be surprised if it got downvoted on HN as lacking substance), this time, it fits. The "arguments" provided we're inane, providing no justification for the very-few actual suggestions contained therein. What is particularly sad is that I completely agree with his comments on XML, and I try to teach others about the dangers of not using XML intelligently, but I would never refer to this author to back up my feelings.
gfodor 15y ago
It's certainly a poor way to argue when you set yourself up so that unless the opposing side agrees with you on politics, morality, the U.S. government, education, human development, and oh yeah, portable document formats, they're going to be forced to disagree with you.
- Jach 15y ago
  Only if the opposing side is an idiot who can't separate beliefs about separate things from one another. Naggum himself has a great rant on such "one-bit" people: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3225130472400367@naggum.net.html http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3225130472400367@naggum.... But then, if you're knowingly arguing with idiots, it's typically done more for some weird sense of fun than for the purpose of actually trying to change their mind. Even an argument between supposedly smart people (even those aware of Bayes' Theorem) doesn't result in mind changes all that often. Actually changing someone else's mind about something they already have a relatively firm belief on is at least as hard as changing your own mind.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    So it's only a poor way to argue if the opposing side is a normal human, is what you're saying. If you think you can fully separate beliefs about separate things from another, there's a whole slew of psychology research that says you're deluded.
    - kstenerud 15y ago
      This has piqued my interest. What specific research are you referring to?
  - gfodor 15y ago
    The point isn't that they are unable to separate their beliefs, it's that if you give me a slew of arguments (all of which are tangentially related) and I happen to disagree strongly with one of them, I'm likely to focus on that one and argue against that point. At worst, it causes me to reply about my opinion on George W. Bush (and not about XML) and at best it is a distraction and makes me feel like your assumptions are wrong (since I disagree with them on the political plane) and hence there must be a flaw in your higher level argument tying them together. In my experience people who make such sweeping connections between disperate concepts, fields, events, etc usually have a very shallow understanding of the things they are tying together and tend to be conspiracy theorists, seeing patterns where none exist. Scroll through any "new age" section in your local bookstore and you will find books tying together religion, quantum physics, numerology, human health, evolution, poetry, and other areas in the hope that they are building up a wall of irrefutable evidence by sheer breadth alone. In the end, by their lack of focus, they end up having no deep argument at all and are generally profoundly wrong in at least one (if not all) of the areas they use in their arguments, deflating their entire point.
conanite 15y ago
It is usual to correlate technology preferences with entrepriseyness - BigCo developers, in general, prefer java or c#, whereas startuppy devs, in general, prefer ruby or python, and nobody likes php except the millions of devs who use it. Is there a similar correlation between technology preferences and political leaning, or religion? If I said I was Christian, or opposed abortion, or approved of gun ownership or of invading Iraq, would you assume, bayesianly, that I probably prefer XML to JSON? Does a preference for lisp, for example, indicate a predisposition to atheism? What kinds of political or religious leanings might be inferred from one's position on the RDBMS-NoSQL spectrum?
- fierarul 15y ago
  Programming is a way of modeling reality and a preference might reflect a bit of your own mind. Then again, people aren't always consistent, so it might not necessarily correlate strongly. Nice remark though!
grannyg00se 15y ago
At first the hyperbole was somewhat amusing. But as he criticizes xml for being too heavy for what it is frequently used for, so are his diversions into politics and human behaviour. They end up becoming an obstruction to the meat of the text.
thyrsus 15y ago
My worst practical problem with XML is that it is kryptonite to doing conflict resolution in version control systems. I've eased my pain with one such document by translating the document elements to a directory full of files, each of which has the name of its unique identifier attribute and the contents of which looks something like === attributes === a=b === contained elements === id_1234 id_4567 === associated text === This is the text associated with this element Those one-line tags which are syntactically distinct from attributes or identifiers serve as anchors for the diff program to "do the right thing". For this application, I can omit whitespace text elements, and there is at most one #text element per containing element, so I can conflate them. Were there more than one, I could generate id's for the contained text elements. Are there better ways of doing this? Tools?
cdent 15y ago
This really shouldn't be news. The complaint seems to be that XML is no good for anything that isn't document/text heavy (i.e. doesn't fit in with the intent of SGML). If you weren't already thinking this in 2002 then you probably weren't paying attention.
jroseattle 15y ago
Unfortunately, I lose interest in this rant amongst all the inane references to other things in the world. Kind of ironic that an argument in favor of less verbosity couldn't be more verbose itself.
- bestes 15y ago
  I feel the same way, except it has been quite a while since I've read a good usenet-style rant, so I indulged. The correctness of an idea vs the expression of the idea are not related. You can be "right" and horrible at explaining or "wrong" and very persuasive and eloquent. The comparisons with comments from Linus are good examples. He can be very abrasive and condescending, but is usually right!
  - dhconnelly 15y ago
    The author's technical criticisms are indeed valid. But Linus Torvalds doesn't compare things to murderous, rapist gang members, or offer offensive social commentary on the culture of an entire nation, and I suspect he wouldn't find your comparison of him to this author very flattering.
spinchange 15y ago
This is kind of off-topic, but whenever I see a spate of, "Is RSS dead/dying?" posts, I wish they would focus more of the historical context around the W3C and XML standards and developer/browser maker reaction to that to split from the W3C to focus of HTML/CSS/JS Are there any other end-user facing specs/apps built on XML beside beside RSS? It always seemed redundant to me that the most popular RSS reader is Google's which is re-wrapping stripped down XML feeds back into a another HTML/CSS/Javascript presentation layer. Maybe JSON readers would be more popular to implement.
- icebraining 15y ago
  I don't know what do you mean by "end-user facing specs/apps". But if enterprise apps where the content is formatted in XML count, then there are thousands (I'm working on OpenERP, for example, which uses XML both to define views and to transmit content to the client). Then there's SVG. And the Office formats, both MS' and LibreOffice's. And obviously XHTML. And XMPP, which drives Google Talk and clients to FB Chat. Just look at the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_markup_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_markup_languages
Aqueous 15y ago
"If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." I think he could have just left it there.
scranglis 15y ago
This part felt particularly applicable to the intellectual (and emotional) environment of young companies and the products they bring forth: Many an idea or concept not only looks, but /is/ good in its infancy, yet turns destructive later in life. Scaling and maturation are not the obvious processes they appear to be because they take so much time that the accumulated effort is easy to overlook. To be successful, they must also be very carefully guided by people who can envision the end result, but that makes it appear to many as if it merely "happens". The idea and the people that carry it out are intertwined because neither are static or even have any "essential" material whatsoever. Worth reading just to have that thought articulated so well (once again).
stesch 15y ago
R.I.P.
cppsnob 15y ago
Heh, Naggum. Why do we still talk about him? Did he build awesome things? Did he change the world? Affect so many lives by being a great teacher? One thing he did do was hate a lot. You can find him throwing hate at whatever it is you hate, no problem. Perl, C++, XML... whatever (except Lisp), he probably wrote an article flaming it. So when you want to find a well-written article lambasting whatever it is you hate, you can look to Naggum. And while he wrote those thousands of USENET posts, the rest of us were off building great things with the stuff he hated on. He was barely on my radar until he died, and looking through archives I realized he actually responded to me a couple times. I guess I was too busy making stuff to pay much attention.
- aerique 15y ago
  I can't really be bothered to cite references since I'm typing this on an iPad and I doubt you'd care but I do like to point out for others than he has build great things and worked on influential projects (take SGML for example). I can only dream to attain 10% of the technical prowess he achieved in his short life.
- frr149 15y ago
  Erik was a jerk who ruined comp.lang.lisp for years. I can't believe people still praise him.
silverlake 15y ago
15 years ago I had Erik in my killfile. He's dead and I still can't escape him.
evo_9 15y ago
Wiki on Mr. Naggum for those curious about the man behind the rant: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum#_ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum#_
haberman 15y ago
Eh, as XML rants go I prefer this one from Graydon Hoare (lead designer of Mozilla's Rust): http://www.rdb.com/demo/XML/ http://www.rdb.com/demo/XML/ It colorfully beats around the bush a bit, but its primary points are: 1. any lossless coding of bits can be cajoled into representing anything, the important question is whether it's a convenient coding. 2. the fact that so many XML formats have sub-languages embedded into strings means that nearly all XML processing requires another, higher level of software to fully parse the document. (it also is evidence that XML wasn't that convenient of an encoding to begin with). 3. just because you can write a document of XML expressing some logical idea doesn't mean that the idea is implementable. For example, the "Spacecraft Markup Language" (which is a real thing, or was).
dkarl 15y ago
I can't believe the discussion about this article has devolved into a discussion about whether a particular writing style, which has been a witty and entertaining vehicle for argument for thousands of years, should be expunged from the programming community as if it were a pathology. A preference for civility is one thing, but an inability to distinguish between different pieces of writing according to their intent, effect, and value is another thing entirely. Naggum's target here is XML (a juggernaut) and the entire community behind it (another juggernaut,) not an individual poster. He isn't bullying anyone or singling anyone out personally. He also writes with a great deal of experience and insight into this particular problem, and his tone is very well-suited to communicate his experience and insight. The programming community has its share, and maybe more than its share, of people who hurt the community more than help it because of how they treat other people, and also people who could learn to participate in a much more constructive way. The matter can't be oversimplified, though. There are no simple rules that can be applied. Sure, you could describe the post as aggressive, intolerant, and irritable. Most writing that can be described as aggressive, intolerant, and irritable could be improved by making it less so. Then again, most things described as "pungent" -- rotting garbage, my feet -- could be improved by making them less so, but not Camembert.
- dhconnelly 15y ago
  "his tone is very well-suited to communicate his experience and insight" I find this statement fascinating. I was unaware that a discussion of, for example, the breast-size preferences of American males was relevant to a criticism of XML. Indeed, I did not consider that discussion, or others in his rant, to be an effective method of communicating his experience and insight regarding XML.
  - dkarl 15y ago
    Anything can become relevant through analogy. Attributes, explicit end-tags, character entities, and validation before processing are acknowledged as worthwhile features in the contexts SGML was originally created for, but the desire to have them in the contexts XML is intended for is compared to an infantile longing to receive the comforts a child receives from a mother, when one is no longer a child and is relating to someone who is not one's mother. Abstractly speaking, an expectation that develops in one context (a tiny infant nursing from his mother's swollen breast) may become ridiculous if it is transferred unmodified into a different context (a grown man who expects women to have breasts larger than his head.)
rch 15y ago
I noticed the reference to binary representations with some enthusiasm. For a variety of reasons, I find myself using HDF5 in instances where I might have chosen XML (or JSON for that matter) a few years ago.

86 points by batista 15y ago

Especially the part around 2/3rds of the text, about how to improve XML. Also loved the jokes and metaphors. We need such people in tech discussions, most community leaders have turned teletubbies-nice to each other, to the detriment not only of a good flame-fight, but of the actual dismissal of brain dead ideas. Instead of violently ridiculing proponents of bad ideas/software/etc to shame and (hopefully) sepuku, we tip-toe around them, or at best, just make light fun of them, like in the "Mongo is webscale" video.

rollypolly 15y ago
My favorite: Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes. One of the many reasons I love json.
- jebblue 15y ago
  XML and HTML are derivatives of SGML. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Sources http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Sources http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/book4/ch02.html I can't imagine HTML without attributes: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/attributes.html
rpeden 15y ago
I agree with you, and don't mind someone being blunt when they believe they're right and mainstream views are wrong, even when I disagree with the argument the person is making. It often seems to result in a strong reaction in the opposite direction, however. I was amused when I read Ted Dziuba's "Node.js is Cancer" rant, and was able to separate the technical arguments from the invective and evaluate them on their merit. A lot of people, though, seemed to respond angrily with indignant forum or blog posts. So I suppose there's always the danger that being too blunt will result in your real message being lost in the resulting firestorm.
- frou_dh 15y ago
  Dziuba's post has ended up the 3rd result on Google for node.js. Mission accomplished, I'm sure!
olavk 15y ago
I think rants like these makes us more stupid. It turns a discussion about pros and cons of various technologies into pissing matches. His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand, but only serves to set up "studid" versus "smart" and appeals to emotion by hoping to convince the reader to the side of the smart ones, without actually arguing the specific points of the thechnology. (E.g. why is backslash obviously better than ampersand-semicolon as character escapes? If he have a valid argument for this he certainly does't feel the need to disclose the reason for the reader. He would rather make an elaborate infantilization analogy about breasts.) I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need to feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools may have various pros and cons in different specific situations.
- batista 15y ago
  >His colorful metaphors does not actually illuminate the issue at hand I think quite the opposite, he makes a very compelling case, and even gets into the details. Even in the part you mention, for example you missed some stuff that answers your question (without hand-holding): = = = Then, remove the obnoxious character entities and escape special characters with _a single character_, like \, and _name other entities with letters following the same character_. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols, _discover Unicode_. = = = >I guess this kind of rant appeals to people who have a deep need feel as part of small elite surrounded by a sea of stupidity, but doesn't have the capacity to understant how different tools have pros and cons in specific situations. It's not about "different tools have pros and cons in specific situations", it's about how some tools have defects that make them bad for EVERY SINGLE situation. CORBA comes to mind as another example. It's not that something XML-like cannot be good for certain situations. It's rather that XML as-it-was-designed has several flaws that don't NEED to be there, and don't benefit ANY use case. For example, goto has some use cases in C that it is good for. NULL terminated strings on the other hand are a bad idea, and have no place anywhere.
  - sixbrx 15y ago
    The parts you quoted between === from the article aren't at all a compelling case to me, that's nothing more than a prescription. If he has some argument here, he needs to make it.
cygx 15y ago
Also loved the jokes and metaphors. I did not: He tried to be clever, but only succeeded in looking like an asshole. The technical criticism may have merit, the presentation leaves a lot to be desired. We need such people in tech discussions I don't. Thankfully, it's easy to ignore people on the internet.

pwpwp 15y ago

Naggum's the name.

crazygringo 15y ago

> (I note in passing that the stereotypical American male longs for much larger than natural female breasts, presumably to maintain the proportion to his own size from his infancy, which has caused the stereotypical American female to feel a need for breasts that will give the next generation a demand for even more disproportionally large breasts.) Is this how Norwegians see Americans?!

arthur_debert 15y ago
This is how much of the world see Americans
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
golden_apples 15y ago
Given that breastfeeding has been declining in America over the past couple generations, it reflects a misunderstanding of American sexual pathology, if, in fact, it was meant as more than a throwaway comment.
batista 15y ago
No, this is how European psychologists/psychoanalysis guys in general see Americans. As a general notion it's not that far for the truth, if you ask me, even if the casual mechanism to explain it is wrong.

mindstab 15y ago

And that's how we seem to have transitioned to JSON, at least for some information storage and transition :) Remember when it was all the rage to use XML for RPC? and even in AJAX?

benwr 15y ago
Hard to forget, given that you have to type "XMLHttpRequest" every time you do any AJAX (The 'X' in which stands for XML, iirc).
- mindstab 15y ago
  haha ah right! Excellent (and tragic) example! I've been using jQuery too much at work and been spoilt by $.get() ;)
- batista 15y ago
  No you don't, since 99% of the time you'd use some library for that, like jQuery.
TeeWEE 15y ago
JSON and XML have two totally different application domains. For some XML is better for some JSON. People who think JSON is better never had a problem with changing data schemas, different parties and common interface. In short XML is a lot more powerful than simple JSON. JSON is a subset of XML with a different syntax.
- DavidAbrams 15y ago
  How is XML any more immune to schema changes?
  - rickette 15y ago
    Is not immune, but you have an explicit contract in the form of a XML Schema Definition (XSD).

6ren 15y ago

> ...go for a binary representation. ... The question of what we humans need to read and write no longer has any bearing on what the computers need to work with. We seem to be heading away from binary. I think the bigger problem with XML is the XML stack. Many of the ideas are insightful, powerful, useful - but the embodiments are tedious (e.g. XML Schema, XSLT). OTOH, a problem is an opportunity

dhconnelly 15y ago

The title of this post should be "how not to disagree with others in a public forum". The tone is alienating and disrespectful, so much so that the valid criticisms of XML as a technology are completely buried by the arrogance and off-topic political and social commentary: "the current American presidency and XML have much in common", "XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." If we want computing to be a friendly and welcoming field and contribute to the betterment of humanity, we can't tolerate people who behave like this in public.

ScottBurson 15y ago
I think the worst of it was Naggum's utter conviction of his own moral superiority... at the same time he was gleefully dumping shit on others. He's dead, BTW. Although he was smart and sometimes made good points, I do not miss him.
- batista 15y ago
  >I think the worst of it was Naggum's utter conviction of his own moral superiority... at the same time he was gleefully dumping shit on others. How is that "the worst"? One's feeling of moral superiority and dumping shit on others are not contradictory --except if one's conviction of his moral superiority is wrong. Dumping shit on others does not make you morally inferior (in the same way that they could be), if that's what you suggest. If one is bad-mouthing some rapist, it doesn't mean that he's as morally bad as the rapist because of doing so. That said, all this "moral" thing is beside the point: what Naggun was utterly convicted of was his _technical_ correctness, which is something completely different.
  - pwpwp 15y ago
    Can you please stop calling him Naggun?
    - batista 15y ago
      Well, if everybody understands that I refer to Naggum, where's the problem? (That's essentially the argument of the "omit semicolons / pro ASI" people -- since browsers grok it, where's the problem with abusing an error checking mechanism with our syntax?) That said, what is it to you? I thought that was his name, probably because phonetically it sounds better in my language, so I misspelled it 2-3 times. Only know I found out it is Naggum. It's not like I did it on purpose, or that I would continue doing it if I knew better, so I find your request absurd.

raverbashing 15y ago

Yes, it's a rant. Why? Because probably the author is tired of explaining the same things over and over to the XML defenders Really JSON is better (and XML is crap) it's ridiculous, it's obvious, it's clear cut, and when people "don't get it" you start resorting to irony Like this: > Enclose the /element/ in matching delimiters, not the tag Let's compare them <blah>foo</blah> To json blah: foo 1 - size (json wins) 2 - matching. Here's an exercise, try splitting json with sed, and then try with XML. Sed is a good exercise, because it's limited to simple grammars, so it kind of gives an idea how much trouble it is to parse each one 3 - redundancy: what would mean if the line was <blah>foo</lala> This is a mistake, right? But I can assume the tag name is blah and the data is foo. This is a glaring redundancy in grammar, bound to cause trouble. Not to mention working with json data (like python) is natural compared to work with XML data.

olavk 15y ago
Now try to apply this to the real world. The most popular and widely used SGML-derived format by far is (X)HTML. Show me e.g. how a paragraph with a few embedded links is improved by translating to JSON. It is not. Of course some kinds of data are indeed expressed simpler with JSON. Another real world example is RSS. More data-y that HTML but still may contain mixed content. Would it be better if it had been JSON from the beginning? The answer is not clear cut. So maybe JSON is not always the right answer. Maybe it depends on what kind of data you want to express. But then it suddely is not a debate with a "XML-defenders" which "dont get it". Then it is a discussion about which tool is approprite in a given situation rather than a war between tribes. And how do you boost you ego and sense of superiority with a boring debate about tools?
- raverbashing 15y ago
  Popular != Better "Show me e.g. how a paragraph with a few embedded links is improved by translating to JSON." Even though HTML and XML are related, something like a web page is so ingrained that would be difficult to change And JSON was never a markup language The criticism of XML goes much more towards using it as a 'Key/Value' serialization format. But you could imagine something like that (commas and colons would have to be replaced in a 'JSON' markup language) {p: Read it on {href:news.ycombinator.com, a:Hacker News}} Size gains, parsing speed gains. RSS is not as clear cut, really, it's not a complicated structure, so it could be YAML for example "So maybe JSON is not always the right answer. Maybe it depends on what kind of data you want to express" XML has attributes, which I'm not against (unlike the article) and it has a more natural nesting of information. But for the majority of data, yes, JSON is better This is about coder productivity (which is increased with JSON it's not even funny), either in Python/Java (even with the whole swiss army knife of XML libs they have)/C# or others. Speed is also a issue. Encoding and decoding XML is slower, even with C speedups (example: Python lxml). And this is relevant for transformation of data or even sending it to the user.

sciurus 15y ago

The heart of his suggestions: Remove the syntactic mess that is attributes. (You will then find that you do not need them at all.) Enclose the /element/ in matching delimiters, not the tag. These simple things makes people think differently about how they use the language. Contrary to the foolish notion that syntax is immaterial, people optimize the way they express themselves, and so express themselves differently with different syntaxes. Next, introduce macros that look exactly like elements, but that are expanded in place between the reader and the "object model". Then, remove the obnoxious character entities and escape special characters with a single character, like \, and name other entities with letters following the same character. If you need a rich set of publishing symbols, discover Unicode. Finally, introduce a language for micro-parsers than can take more convenient syntaxes for commonly used elements with complex structure and make them /return/ element structures more suitable for processing on the receiving end, and which would also make validation something useful. The overly simple regular expression look-alike was a good idea when processing was expensive and made all decisions at the start-tag, but with a DOM and less stream-like processing, a much better language should be specified that could also do serious computation before validating a document -- so that once again processing could become cheaper because of the "markup", not more expensive because of it. But the one thing I would change the most from a markup language suitable for marking up the incidental instruction to a type-setter to the data representation language suitable for the "market" that XML wants, is to go for a binary representation.

olavk 15y ago
He basically suggest turning XML into s-expressions. Eg. <p>Hello, <a href="http://example.com">world</p> Turns into something like: <p "Hello," <a <href "http://example.com">"world">> Not an obvious win as far as I can tell, wouldn't like to fix an ummatched bracket in a document ending in >>>> rather than e.g. </form><div></body></html>. But your mileage may vary. His other ideas have more or less been implemented, with varying success. XML-Schemas have been introduced which is more powerful that DTD's. Some schema languages can indeed do complex computations for better or worse. The macro-expansion approach is how XSL-formatting worked, and it turned out it was not as powerful or elegant as the CSS approach. It made sense when coming from a publishing background, but didn't predict dynamic interactive web pages.

moron 15y ago

The parts of this that aren't about XML are stupid as hell.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
While I generally dislike comments like this (and I wouldn't be surprised if it got downvoted on HN as lacking substance), this time, it fits. The "arguments" provided we're inane, providing no justification for the very-few actual suggestions contained therein. What is particularly sad is that I completely agree with his comments on XML, and I try to teach others about the dangers of not using XML intelligently, but I would never refer to this author to back up my feelings.

gfodor 15y ago

It's certainly a poor way to argue when you set yourself up so that unless the opposing side agrees with you on politics, morality, the U.S. government, education, human development, and oh yeah, portable document formats, they're going to be forced to disagree with you.

Jach 15y ago
Only if the opposing side is an idiot who can't separate beliefs about separate things from one another. Naggum himself has a great rant on such "one-bit" people: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3225130472400367@naggum.net.html http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3225130472400367@naggum.... But then, if you're knowingly arguing with idiots, it's typically done more for some weird sense of fun than for the purpose of actually trying to change their mind. Even an argument between supposedly smart people (even those aware of Bayes' Theorem) doesn't result in mind changes all that often. Actually changing someone else's mind about something they already have a relatively firm belief on is at least as hard as changing your own mind.
- vidarh 15y ago
  So it's only a poor way to argue if the opposing side is a normal human, is what you're saying. If you think you can fully separate beliefs about separate things from another, there's a whole slew of psychology research that says you're deluded.
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    This has piqued my interest. What specific research are you referring to?
- gfodor 15y ago
  The point isn't that they are unable to separate their beliefs, it's that if you give me a slew of arguments (all of which are tangentially related) and I happen to disagree strongly with one of them, I'm likely to focus on that one and argue against that point. At worst, it causes me to reply about my opinion on George W. Bush (and not about XML) and at best it is a distraction and makes me feel like your assumptions are wrong (since I disagree with them on the political plane) and hence there must be a flaw in your higher level argument tying them together. In my experience people who make such sweeping connections between disperate concepts, fields, events, etc usually have a very shallow understanding of the things they are tying together and tend to be conspiracy theorists, seeing patterns where none exist. Scroll through any "new age" section in your local bookstore and you will find books tying together religion, quantum physics, numerology, human health, evolution, poetry, and other areas in the hope that they are building up a wall of irrefutable evidence by sheer breadth alone. In the end, by their lack of focus, they end up having no deep argument at all and are generally profoundly wrong in at least one (if not all) of the areas they use in their arguments, deflating their entire point.

conanite 15y ago

It is usual to correlate technology preferences with entrepriseyness - BigCo developers, in general, prefer java or c#, whereas startuppy devs, in general, prefer ruby or python, and nobody likes php except the millions of devs who use it. Is there a similar correlation between technology preferences and political leaning, or religion? If I said I was Christian, or opposed abortion, or approved of gun ownership or of invading Iraq, would you assume, bayesianly, that I probably prefer XML to JSON? Does a preference for lisp, for example, indicate a predisposition to atheism? What kinds of political or religious leanings might be inferred from one's position on the RDBMS-NoSQL spectrum?

fierarul 15y ago
Programming is a way of modeling reality and a preference might reflect a bit of your own mind. Then again, people aren't always consistent, so it might not necessarily correlate strongly. Nice remark though!

grannyg00se 15y ago

At first the hyperbole was somewhat amusing. But as he criticizes xml for being too heavy for what it is frequently used for, so are his diversions into politics and human behaviour. They end up becoming an obstruction to the meat of the text.

thyrsus 15y ago

My worst practical problem with XML is that it is kryptonite to doing conflict resolution in version control systems. I've eased my pain with one such document by translating the document elements to a directory full of files, each of which has the name of its unique identifier attribute and the contents of which looks something like === attributes === a=b === contained elements === id_1234 id_4567 === associated text === This is the text associated with this element Those one-line tags which are syntactically distinct from attributes or identifiers serve as anchors for the diff program to "do the right thing". For this application, I can omit whitespace text elements, and there is at most one #text element per containing element, so I can conflate them. Were there more than one, I could generate id's for the contained text elements. Are there better ways of doing this? Tools?

cdent 15y ago

This really shouldn't be news. The complaint seems to be that XML is no good for anything that isn't document/text heavy (i.e. doesn't fit in with the intent of SGML). If you weren't already thinking this in 2002 then you probably weren't paying attention.

jroseattle 15y ago

Unfortunately, I lose interest in this rant amongst all the inane references to other things in the world. Kind of ironic that an argument in favor of less verbosity couldn't be more verbose itself.

bestes 15y ago
I feel the same way, except it has been quite a while since I've read a good usenet-style rant, so I indulged. The correctness of an idea vs the expression of the idea are not related. You can be "right" and horrible at explaining or "wrong" and very persuasive and eloquent. The comparisons with comments from Linus are good examples. He can be very abrasive and condescending, but is usually right!
- dhconnelly 15y ago
  The author's technical criticisms are indeed valid. But Linus Torvalds doesn't compare things to murderous, rapist gang members, or offer offensive social commentary on the culture of an entire nation, and I suspect he wouldn't find your comparison of him to this author very flattering.

spinchange 15y ago

This is kind of off-topic, but whenever I see a spate of, "Is RSS dead/dying?" posts, I wish they would focus more of the historical context around the W3C and XML standards and developer/browser maker reaction to that to split from the W3C to focus of HTML/CSS/JS Are there any other end-user facing specs/apps built on XML beside beside RSS? It always seemed redundant to me that the most popular RSS reader is Google's which is re-wrapping stripped down XML feeds back into a another HTML/CSS/Javascript presentation layer. Maybe JSON readers would be more popular to implement.

icebraining 15y ago
I don't know what do you mean by "end-user facing specs/apps". But if enterprise apps where the content is formatted in XML count, then there are thousands (I'm working on OpenERP, for example, which uses XML both to define views and to transmit content to the client). Then there's SVG. And the Office formats, both MS' and LibreOffice's. And obviously XHTML. And XMPP, which drives Google Talk and clients to FB Chat. Just look at the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_markup_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_markup_languages

Aqueous 15y ago

"If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape." I think he could have just left it there.

scranglis 15y ago

This part felt particularly applicable to the intellectual (and emotional) environment of young companies and the products they bring forth: Many an idea or concept not only looks, but /is/ good in its infancy, yet turns destructive later in life. Scaling and maturation are not the obvious processes they appear to be because they take so much time that the accumulated effort is easy to overlook. To be successful, they must also be very carefully guided by people who can envision the end result, but that makes it appear to many as if it merely "happens". The idea and the people that carry it out are intertwined because neither are static or even have any "essential" material whatsoever. Worth reading just to have that thought articulated so well (once again).

stesch 15y ago

R.I.P.

cppsnob 15y ago

Heh, Naggum. Why do we still talk about him? Did he build awesome things? Did he change the world? Affect so many lives by being a great teacher? One thing he did do was hate a lot. You can find him throwing hate at whatever it is you hate, no problem. Perl, C++, XML... whatever (except Lisp), he probably wrote an article flaming it. So when you want to find a well-written article lambasting whatever it is you hate, you can look to Naggum. And while he wrote those thousands of USENET posts, the rest of us were off building great things with the stuff he hated on. He was barely on my radar until he died, and looking through archives I realized he actually responded to me a couple times. I guess I was too busy making stuff to pay much attention.

aerique 15y ago
I can't really be bothered to cite references since I'm typing this on an iPad and I doubt you'd care but I do like to point out for others than he has build great things and worked on influential projects (take SGML for example). I can only dream to attain 10% of the technical prowess he achieved in his short life.
frr149 15y ago
Erik was a jerk who ruined comp.lang.lisp for years. I can't believe people still praise him.

silverlake 15y ago

15 years ago I had Erik in my killfile. He's dead and I still can't escape him.

evo_9 15y ago

Wiki on Mr. Naggum for those curious about the man behind the rant: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum#_ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum#_

haberman 15y ago

Eh, as XML rants go I prefer this one from Graydon Hoare (lead designer of Mozilla's Rust): http://www.rdb.com/demo/XML/ http://www.rdb.com/demo/XML/ It colorfully beats around the bush a bit, but its primary points are: 1. any lossless coding of bits can be cajoled into representing anything, the important question is whether it's a convenient coding. 2. the fact that so many XML formats have sub-languages embedded into strings means that nearly all XML processing requires another, higher level of software to fully parse the document. (it also is evidence that XML wasn't that convenient of an encoding to begin with). 3. just because you can write a document of XML expressing some logical idea doesn't mean that the idea is implementable. For example, the "Spacecraft Markup Language" (which is a real thing, or was).

dkarl 15y ago

I can't believe the discussion about this article has devolved into a discussion about whether a particular writing style, which has been a witty and entertaining vehicle for argument for thousands of years, should be expunged from the programming community as if it were a pathology. A preference for civility is one thing, but an inability to distinguish between different pieces of writing according to their intent, effect, and value is another thing entirely. Naggum's target here is XML (a juggernaut) and the entire community behind it (another juggernaut,) not an individual poster. He isn't bullying anyone or singling anyone out personally. He also writes with a great deal of experience and insight into this particular problem, and his tone is very well-suited to communicate his experience and insight. The programming community has its share, and maybe more than its share, of people who hurt the community more than help it because of how they treat other people, and also people who could learn to participate in a much more constructive way. The matter can't be oversimplified, though. There are no simple rules that can be applied. Sure, you could describe the post as aggressive, intolerant, and irritable. Most writing that can be described as aggressive, intolerant, and irritable could be improved by making it less so. Then again, most things described as "pungent" -- rotting garbage, my feet -- could be improved by making them less so, but not Camembert.

dhconnelly 15y ago
"his tone is very well-suited to communicate his experience and insight" I find this statement fascinating. I was unaware that a discussion of, for example, the breast-size preferences of American males was relevant to a criticism of XML. Indeed, I did not consider that discussion, or others in his rant, to be an effective method of communicating his experience and insight regarding XML.
- dkarl 15y ago
  Anything can become relevant through analogy. Attributes, explicit end-tags, character entities, and validation before processing are acknowledged as worthwhile features in the contexts SGML was originally created for, but the desire to have them in the contexts XML is intended for is compared to an infantile longing to receive the comforts a child receives from a mother, when one is no longer a child and is relating to someone who is not one's mother. Abstractly speaking, an expectation that develops in one context (a tiny infant nursing from his mother's swollen breast) may become ridiculous if it is transferred unmodified into a different context (a grown man who expects women to have breasts larger than his head.)

rch 15y ago

I noticed the reference to binary representations with some enthusiasm. For a variety of reasons, I find myself using HDF5 in instances where I might have chosen XML (or JSON for that matter) a few years ago.