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> Anyone working in this space 20 years ago couldn’t possibly have known of their problems so every problem deserves a new solution. It's worth noting that som

by tekacs 12y ago

> Anyone working in this space 20 years ago couldn’t possibly have known of their problems so every problem deserves a new solution. It's worth noting that sometimes the reason for developing a new solution is to be free of the baggage that comes with all the failed attempts on the old infrastructure... e.g. JSON-based solutions over the many attempts to use XML (XML is a capable base, but many find it unwieldy to say the least)

csirac2 12y ago
Well, I'm sure the creators of JSON weren't thinking of XML use-cases at the time. When it comes to solution-agnostic, self-describing, self-validating semantic markup, I'm not sure JSON-LD buys you much over RDF serialized to XML (for example).
- erikpukinskis 12y ago
  I can speak for myself and say XML died for me when it was decided that the standard interface to it would be stream parsing. I found that stuff incomprehensible. I get the perf benefits, but it was always premature optimization for me. You throw a JSON string at a simple parser and get an object back. That's why it won a place in my heart. Nothing prevented xml from being that except that's just not what the lib authors did. There was so much talk about XML being the One True Data Structure I think it ended up being a jack of all trades, master of none.
  - lmm 12y ago
    The problem with XML was that people tried to make it semantic. You had XML Schema (awful), and because of schema you had to have namespacing (also awful). Take that away - plain unnamespaced tags, with no semantics beyond "this is a character sequence", common-sense business-specific tag names, and no schema - and you get something that's just as nice to work with as JSON is. And there are plenty of libraries (e.g. Jackson) that will serialize back and forth to objects. But too many people drank the semantic kool-aid and tried to autogenerate classes from schemata or other such silliness.

by tekacs 12y ago

csirac2 12y ago

Well, I'm sure the creators of JSON weren't thinking of XML use-cases at the time. When it comes to solution-agnostic, self-describing, self-validating semantic markup, I'm not sure JSON-LD buys you much over RDF serialized to XML (for example).

erikpukinskis 12y ago
I can speak for myself and say XML died for me when it was decided that the standard interface to it would be stream parsing. I found that stuff incomprehensible. I get the perf benefits, but it was always premature optimization for me. You throw a JSON string at a simple parser and get an object back. That's why it won a place in my heart. Nothing prevented xml from being that except that's just not what the lib authors did. There was so much talk about XML being the One True Data Structure I think it ended up being a jack of all trades, master of none.
- lmm 12y ago
  The problem with XML was that people tried to make it semantic. You had XML Schema (awful), and because of schema you had to have namespacing (also awful). Take that away - plain unnamespaced tags, with no semantics beyond "this is a character sequence", common-sense business-specific tag names, and no schema - and you get something that's just as nice to work with as JSON is. And there are plenty of libraries (e.g. Jackson) that will serialize back and forth to objects. But too many people drank the semantic kool-aid and tried to autogenerate classes from schemata or other such silliness.