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My biggest hatred of xml as a data structure, and believe me I've seen this in production systems more then once, is that it allows for the following. <custo

My biggest hatred of xml as a data structure, and believe me I've seen this in production systems more then once, is that it allows for the following. <customer> <account> <type>Personal</type> ... </account> <account> <type>Business</type> ... </account> <custid>496F3AB</custid> </customer> This may seem innocuous, but XML allows mixing of arrays and objects too liberally, and makes automatic parsing overly complex. At first <customer> appears to be an array of account objects, but wait now that we reach the end we find that <customer> is an object with multiple keys and must create an unnamed array key to hold accounts. XML is a document markup language, not a data format.

tokenizerrr 13y ago
Well yes. The problem there is that someone made a bad decision on how to structure their XML. If the same was done like this: <customer custid="496F3AB"> <account> <type>Personal</type> ... </account> <account> <type>Business</type> ... </account> </customer> it would make a lot more sense, I think.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Or: <customer> <custid>496F3AB</custid> <accounts> <account> <type>Personal</type> ... </account> <account> <type>Business</type> ... </account> </accounts> </customer>
- sixbrx 13y ago
  Which problem XML makes all too easy. The really annoying issue is as the parent says, that the accounts collection does not have a name. This means there's no canonical mapping for the structure into a programming language object, which necessitates that libraries require annotations or some other side-channel way of specifying how to wrap the accounts into a collection. In Jaxb e.g., how many times must we add junk like: @XmlElementWrapper(name = "accounts") ? In any individual case the workaround is easy, but it's annoying to have to do it repeatedly. XML really is better as document markup than structured data representation.

tokenizerrr 13y ago

Well yes. The problem there is that someone made a bad decision on how to structure their XML. If the same was done like this: <customer custid="496F3AB"> <account> <type>Personal</type> ... </account> <account> <type>Business</type> ... </account> </customer> it would make a lot more sense, I think.

icebraining 13y ago
Or: <customer> <custid>496F3AB</custid> <accounts> <account> <type>Personal</type> ... </account> <account> <type>Business</type> ... </account> </accounts> </customer>
sixbrx 13y ago
Which problem XML makes all too easy. The really annoying issue is as the parent says, that the accounts collection does not have a name. This means there's no canonical mapping for the structure into a programming language object, which necessitates that libraries require annotations or some other side-channel way of specifying how to wrap the accounts into a collection. In Jaxb e.g., how many times must we add junk like: @XmlElementWrapper(name = "accounts") ? In any individual case the workaround is easy, but it's annoying to have to do it repeatedly. XML really is better as document markup than structured data representation.