4 ms·

People are (slightly?) less likely to do the stupid "let's generate this structure by gluing strings together" thing that produced the need for liberal Atom and

by bct 13y ago

People are (slightly?) less likely to do the stupid "let's generate this structure by gluing strings together" thing that produced the need for liberal Atom and RSS parsers. (But yes, I agree that "turn this already-existing thing into JSON just because" is a stupid trend.)

saurik 13y ago
The thing that screwed RSS was not it being XML: I've seen the exact same issues happen any time someone has a text field in any file format. (Hell, I'm guilty of this.) They are more related to poor stewardship of a shared protocol than due to the usage of any particular transport encoding. The first issue is that you have a field, and that field is rendered in a text box, and is defined to be text; at some point you go "man, I wish I could add a hyperlink to my text", and so you now want to put some HTML in there. However, the field is just text, so what do you do? Let's say this was JSON, and this text is a string; do you put HTML in the string? This is somewhat equivalent to putting escaped HTML into the text node of the XML document. Alternatively, you could replace the string with an object (vaguely equivalent to putting HTML elements in the RSS). The result of some people choosing the first option (which seems more reasonable at first glance than the second option, as it provides a better experience for existing readers and better fits the existing protocol) is having to look at a string and guess whether it should be parsed as HTML or not. The second problem is that as people make changes in the second direction, if they are not carefully organized and centralized in a specification, you end up with haphazard and incompatible changes: someone decides to add a "type" field with a mime type, someone else adds a different element. Having a ton of people generate the format, and having the thing parsed by some liberal canonical language, leads to too much flexibility in fields like dates: someone puts a weird date format into their date field, and it is parsed correctly, and then tons of other people do it, and you're screwed. This also isn't helped by going with JSON: the field is just more likely to end up being "anything that a JavaScript Date object is willing to convert from a string to a date", which assuredly supports irritating corner cases that are not supported by the Date parsers from other random languages. With RSS, it was really "the peoples' protocol", with the specifications only encoding random changes that had become popular over time. What we were left with was a total mess: I can't find it now, but someone once wrote a proof that you couldn't actually parse RSS due to conflicting standards.

by bct 13y ago

saurik 13y ago

The thing that screwed RSS was not it being XML: I've seen the exact same issues happen any time someone has a text field in any file format. (Hell, I'm guilty of this.) They are more related to poor stewardship of a shared protocol than due to the usage of any particular transport encoding. The first issue is that you have a field, and that field is rendered in a text box, and is defined to be text; at some point you go "man, I wish I could add a hyperlink to my text", and so you now want to put some HTML in there. However, the field is just text, so what do you do? Let's say this was JSON, and this text is a string; do you put HTML in the string? This is somewhat equivalent to putting escaped HTML into the text node of the XML document. Alternatively, you could replace the string with an object (vaguely equivalent to putting HTML elements in the RSS). The result of some people choosing the first option (which seems more reasonable at first glance than the second option, as it provides a better experience for existing readers and better fits the existing protocol) is having to look at a string and guess whether it should be parsed as HTML or not. The second problem is that as people make changes in the second direction, if they are not carefully organized and centralized in a specification, you end up with haphazard and incompatible changes: someone decides to add a "type" field with a mime type, someone else adds a different element. Having a ton of people generate the format, and having the thing parsed by some liberal canonical language, leads to too much flexibility in fields like dates: someone puts a weird date format into their date field, and it is parsed correctly, and then tons of other people do it, and you're screwed. This also isn't helped by going with JSON: the field is just more likely to end up being "anything that a JavaScript Date object is willing to convert from a string to a date", which assuredly supports irritating corner cases that are not supported by the Date parsers from other random languages. With RSS, it was really "the peoples' protocol", with the specifications only encoding random changes that had become popular over time. What we were left with was a total mess: I can't find it now, but someone once wrote a proof that you couldn't actually parse RSS due to conflicting standards.