4 ms·
There is nothing complex about xml schema. It is so profoundly simple, the tools so well worn and proven, that anyone who pronounces difficulty with it is proba
by personZ 12y ago
There is nothing complex about xml schema. It is so profoundly simple, the tools so well worn and proven, that anyone who pronounces difficulty with it is probably in the wrong field.
And the notion that I must be unaware of protocol buffers (which has utterly nothing to do with the JSON vs xml conversation, but I suppose is the bigger brother) is laughable nonsense. Yes, protocol buffers have some advantages (and some significant disadvantages), but that is an entirely different discussion, and the attempt to try to pull it in, simplifying it as if it is some sort of solid point (protip: it isn't even close to a trump card. It has advantages, but it certainly doesn't invalidate xml), is transparent nonsense.
Whatever your personal hangups with xml, your scattered and somewhat desperate attempts to try to denigrate anyone who doesn't denounce it is grossly out of place on any place where professionals converse.
- haberman 12y agoWhoa, you have taken my message a lot more personally than I intended my tone to land. I mean, I was being a little bit snippy about technology, but it wasn't meant at all as a personal attack. Sorry if it came off that way. I wasn't meaning to say that you were unaware of Protocol Buffers, my argument is just Protocol Buffers do achieve most of what XML is trying to achieve, and I think many people don't appreciate that most of the complexity of XML is not inherent to the problem domain, but rather a product of an over-engineered technology stack that is not a good match for the problems to which it is usually applied. A person who is marking up a text document, like with DocBook, has (in my opinion) the best argument for using XML. For more data structure-oriented programming like SVG or web APIs, I believe Protocol Buffers are better in every way, and I think I can defend that argument in rigorous debate. If you go to the XML Schema website and print up the two specs there (Part 1 and Part 2), the printed spec is 371 pages. I think it is difficult to make the argument that it is "profoundly simple." The JSON RFC, at 10 pages, would deserve that characterization.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 12y agoXML Schema describes a language to define a CF-like grammar and a set of extensible types, while JSON is a serialization notation for a data model that has strings, integers, real numbers, booleans, arrays, and dictionaries. No wonder they're different.