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> a contrast between Claude’s modern approach [...] XML, a technology dating back to 1998 Are we really at the point where some people see XML as a spooky old
by RadiozRadioz 8mo ago
> a contrast between Claude’s modern approach [...] XML, a technology dating back to 1998
Are we really at the point where some people see XML as a spooky old technology? The phrasing dotted around this article makes me feel that way. I find this quite strange.
- intrasight 8mo agoYup. Kids these days...
- coldtea 8mo agoXML has been "spooky old technology" for over a decade now. It's heyday was something like 2002. Nobody dares advertise the XML capabilities of their product (which back then everybody did), nobody considers it either hot new thing (like back then) or mature - just obsolete enterprise shit. It's about as popular now as J2EE, except to people that think "10 years ago" means 1999.
- cyanydeez 8mo ago20 years old means 1980!
- vlovich123 8mo agoFor me, even when it was first released, I considered obsolete enterprise shit. That view has not diminished as the sorry state of performance and security in that space has just reaffirmed that perception.
- himata4113 8mo agodidn't know html was spooky tech, TIL. /s
- coldtea 8mo agoHTML predates XML by 5 years. What's more, the web standards bodies even abandoned a short-lived XML-hype-era plan to make a new version of HTML based on XML in 2009. That from this touted to the heavens format a handful of uses remain (some companies still using SOAP, the MS Office monster schemas, RSS, EPUB, and so on) is the very opposite of the adoption it was supposed to have. For those that missed the 90s/early 00s, XML was a hugely hyped format, with enormous corporate adoption between 1999–2005, which deflated totally. Did you also learned those things too today?
- himata4113 8mo agothinking for a bit longer, it does make sense. internet came before xml.
- rhdunn 8mo agoXML is used a lot in standards and publishing industries -- JATS, EPUB, ODF, DOCX/XLSX/..., DocBook, etc. are all XML based/use XML.
- michaelbarton 8mo agoWithout being facetious, isn’t HTML a dialect of XML and very widely used?
- Twisol 8mo agoHTML is actually a dialect of SGML. XHTML was an attempt to move to an XML-based foundation, but XML's strictness in parsing worked against it, and eventually folks just standardized how HTML parsers should interpret ill-formed HTML instead.
- thayne 8mo agoI do wish they at least allowed you to make any tag self closing so I can do <div class="my-element" /> without needing to include a </div>
- michaelbarton 8mo agoAh good to know. It’s interesting (to me) how similar they look to each other but you and other commentators below mention how they’re more like distant cousins I suppose the proof is in the parsing
- vitejose 8mo agoNo, HTML was historically supposed to be a subset of SGML; XML is also an application of SGML. XHTML is the XML version of HTML. As of HTML5, HTML is no longer technically SGML or XML.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- phlakaton 8mo agoHTML is far loosier-goosier in its syntax than XML allows. There was an attempt to nail its syntax down in the pre-HTML 5 days; that's XHTML. When HTML 5 pivoted away from that, that spelled the end of these two things ever coming together. Really, I think you can trace a lot of the "XML is spooky old technology" mindset to the release of HTML 5. That was when XML stopped being directly relevant to the web, though of course it still lives on in many other domains and legacy web apps.
- eduction 8mo agoObsolete enterprise shit I guess includes podcasting. Impressive for the enterprise. I’d be very curious what lasting open formats JSON has been used to build.
- coldtea 8mo agoThat the podcast feed format is XML based is an insignificant detail - and a remnant of the past, nobody cares about. People upload their podcasts to a platform like Apple Music or Spotify or Substack and co, or to some backend connected to their Wordpress/Ghost/etc) and it spits the RSS behind the scenes, with nobody giving a shit about the XML part. Might as well declare USSR a huge IT success because people still play Tetris.
- girvo 8mo agoI kind of miss SOAP. Ahead of its time? Probably not, but I built some cool things on top of it
- pfraze 8mo agoatproto's lexicon-based rpc is pretty soap-like
- vbezhenar 8mo agoRight now I'm writing adapter so people could call one SOAP service using simpler interfaces. That involves implementing WS-Security with non-standard algorithms, that also involves dealing with things like XML escaped into a string and embedded inside another XML. Let's say I hope for the day I'll miss SOAP. Right now I have too much of it.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoIt's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done? I don't think anyone who considers it obsolete has an informed opinion on the matter. Typically a more primitive (sorry, minimal) format such as JSON is sufficient in which case there's no excuse to overcomplicate things. But sometimes JSON isn't sufficient and people start inventing half baked solutions such as JSON-LD for what is already a solved problem with a mature tech stack. XSLT remains an elegant and underused solution. Guile even includes built in XML facilities named SXML.
- mycall 8mo agoIt makes me wonder how well an LLM like Opus can generate XSLT which was always the hard part when writing by hand.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoGiven that the SXML DSL has existed since the early 2000s have ergonomics really been a limiting factor? Of course having LLMs write things for you is also useful.
- coldtea 8mo ago>It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done? People who wanted to "get shit done" had much better alternatives. XML grew out of hype, corporate management forcing it, and bundling to all kinds of third party products and formats just so they can tick the "have this hot new format support" box.
- array_key_first 8mo agoXML is perfectly fine. What are these alternatives? YAML is just bad. JSON is harder to read for deeply nested structures. TOML and the like don't have enough features.
- sham1 8mo agoMaybe ASN.1? Although that has an official XML encoding so maybe not.
- theowaway213456 8mo agoThe evidence suggests that XML was never that popular though for the general audience, you have to admit. For Web markup, as an industry we tried XHTML (HTML that was strictly XML) for a while, and that didn't stick, and now we have HTML5 which is much more lenient as it doesn't even require closing tags in some cases. For data exchange, people vastly prefer JSON as an exchange format for its simplicity, or protobuf and friends for their efficiency. As a configuration format, it has been vastly overtaken by YAML, TOML, and INI, due to their content-forward syntax. Having said all this I know there are some popular tools that use XML like ClickHouse, Apple's launchd, ROS, etc. but these are relatively niche compared to (e.g.) HTML
- icermann 8mo agoMS Office and Open-/LibreOffice are using zipped xml files (e.g. .docx, .xlsx and .odt). Svg vector graphics is xml, the x in ajax stands for xml (although replaced by json by now). SOAP (probably counts as the predecessor of REST) is xml-based. XML was definitely popular in the "well used" sense. How popular it was in the "well liked" sense can maybe be up for debate, but it was the best tool for the job at the time for alot of use cases.
- hbarka 8mo agoIf you think XML is old tech, wait until you hear of EDI, still powering Walmart and Amazon logistics. XML came in like a wrecking ball with its self-documenting promise designed to replace that cryptic pesky payload called EDI. XML promised to solve world hunger. It spawned SOAP, XML over RPC, DOM, DTD, the heyday was beautiful and Microsoft was leading the charge. C# was also right around this time. Consulting firms were bloomed charged with delivering the asynchronous revolution, the loosely coupled messaging promises of XML. I think it succeeded and it’s now quietly in the halls of warehouse having a beer or two with its older cousin the Electronic Data Interchange aka EDI.
- actionfromafar 8mo agoEDI is XML now.
- treebeard901 8mo agoIt all brings back nightmares from migrating the older style EDI for healthcare data for what was HL7 XML at the time. XML is widely used still for all kinds of stuff. On some level if JSON was allowed to evolve the same way, eventually you would just wind up with something like XML.
- actionfromafar 8mo agoJSON is a bad version of XML.
- paulddraper 8mo agoImagine the worst data format you can think of. Then spend the next week making it even more convoluted. That data format is still better than EDI.
- bryanrasmussen 8mo agoI'm not sure if this is a compliment or insult to my powers of invention.
- oytis 8mo agoXML is still around, but I don't think many people would choose it as a serialization format today for something new.
- dathanb82 8mo agoThe use of XML as a data serialization format was always a bad choice. It was designed as a document _markup_ language (it’s in the name), which is exactly the way it’s being used for Claude, and is actually a good use case.
- shams93 8mo agoIt has a number of security issues which have not been fixed which could be used for really interesting exploitation.
- phlakaton 8mo agoI don't think anybody's proposing to throw recursive entity definitions at Claude. Just a little light informally-defined angle-bracket markup.
- WD-42 8mo agoXML is back, everyone is rediscovering the terminal. Soon we’ll discover that object oriented programming is good again.
- Kerrick 8mo agoUnambiguously, though, it is. There's so much trash imperative code in its training data that LLMs tend to vomit out garbage. But if you anchor it with OOP, the quality tends to be higher.
- EmperorClawd 8mo ago[dead]
- siva7 8mo agoI tried following the best practice to use XML tags and the difference was not observable. I honestly believe Anthropic forgot to remove that part of the documentation from Sonnet 3.x days and now people are still writing blogs about this secret sauce
- Bratmon 8mo agoXML is as old now as the PDP-11 was when XML came out.
- toastal 8mo agoXML works great for XMPP. KDL is compatible with it too. What gets me is going from this structured data to Markdown which doesn’t even have enough features & syntax that the LLMs try to invent or co-opt things like the blockquote for not quoting sources.