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XML can't piggyback on the success of anything. It's just a human readable data format, and a cumbersome one at that. It make sense in certain use cases and not
by mycelium 11y ago
XML can't piggyback on the success of anything. It's just a human readable data format, and a cumbersome one at that. It make sense in certain use cases and not in others, but it has to fight it out with other data formats on its own weak merits.
JSON is the object literal format for Javascript, likely the single most widely deployed and used programming language in the world. Until paradigm shifts obsolete the web browser, JSON will be ubiquitous.
- taeric 11y agoThis is.... an interesting perspective. Why couldn't xml "piggyback" off of the success of html, for example?
- shaneofalltrad 11y agoGood point, but xml is "cumbersome" or hard and json is not (in the eyes of many). xml was widely hated before json become widely accepted while json is not as widely hated.
- taeric 11y agoI definitely agree that that is the perception. So, apologies to all if my tone earlier implied any condescension. What intrigues me is why is it so. There is a great article in one of the Programming Pearls books (so, published earlier), that goes over how providing provenance in a data format is highly useful. Yet, by and large, you can not do this in JSON, because comments are disallowed.
- comex 11y agoI think a relevant paradigm shift partially exists in the form of static typing. Sure, you can still use JSON in a statically typed language, and many do, but it's more cumbersome than in a dynamic one, while the space efficiency and built-in validation of things like protobuf start to look more appealing. Even on the web, statically typed compile-to-JS languages are rising in popularity, though nobody is using protobuf there... We'll see. I definitely expect JSON to remain popular for many years at the least.