3 ms·
It always seemed to me that most of the hate around XML was really misdirected hate for SOAP. XML (and particularly XSDs) I rather liked, but maybe I just never
by dcminter 2y ago
It always seemed to me that most of the hate around XML was really misdirected hate for SOAP. XML (and particularly XSDs) I rather liked, but maybe I just never dove deep enough to feel the pain.
- kazinator 2y agoSome of it has to be because people know Lisp. When XML hit the fan, it was the first time some of our Lisp-ignorant colleagues got a taste of notation for structured data. But what a disappointing flop: basically just a recursively chopped-up chararacter string, with no notion of type whatsoever, and a huge amount of verbiage No arrays or lists, no distinction between numeric and textual data. <foo>0xff</foo> might come out as 255 in one application or garbage in another. In XML-land, you see ad-hoc notations within XML that are not part of it, like <temperatures>12.3, 13.7, 13.1, 12.9</temperatures>. When people wrapped their heads around XML, though, it did become a tad easier to explain Lisp as being structured data (like XML) that represents code.
- dcminter 2y agoI just don't buy that there were enough Lisp devs around for that to be a significant source of the hate. Besides, Json has plenty of those issues and doesn't garner a fraction of the distaste. On the other hand SOAP and the tooling around it, particularly the tooling in the Java world which was a hot tech at that time, sucked - and so far as I could see a lot of devs didn't really draw a distinction between XML and SOAP. Ok, actually SOAP probably didn't suck per se - but it was a wildly inappropriate tech for a lot of the problem spaces it was inflicted upon.