

In Defense of XML - Anon84
http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/07/02/InDefenseOfXML.aspx

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jamess
I simply don't buy this argument.

Who cares if there's a wealth of experience out there regarding XML? When
you're designing software, if your primary goal is making it easy on your
developers, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

There is one situation, and one situation only, where XML is the right tool
for the job. That situation is where a computer must produce and/or consume a
file that must be read and/or written by a human. That's it. The only time.
So, XHTML, ja. SOAP, nein. If a computer is consuming data another computer
has produced, why would you want to encode that data in something so hard to
parse, and so potentially ambiguous as XML? It's lunacy.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
I have to disagree. I think that XML is better used for machine-consumable
processes rather than human-edited ones. The wealth of tools available
mitigate the need to roll your own data format and help ensure that your
output will be usable by anyone with a (ubiquitous) XML parser. If your data
will be used by an arbitrary 3rd party there are a lot of advantages to using
XML.

Optimizing for ease of development is _certainly_ a good goal too. Ease of
development equates directly to lowered maintenance costs and redevelopment of
poor code. In my business at least the maintenance costs far outweigh the
initial expenditures when evaluating different technologies.

EDIT: I agree that SOAP is abominable. But that's due to its overall
architecture rather than its use of XML.

~~~
0x44

      I think that XML is better used for machine-consumable
      processes rather than human-edited ones. The wealth of tools
      available mitigate the need to roll your own data format
      and help ensure that your output will be usable by anyone
      with a (ubiquitous) XML parser.
    

That's a false dichotomy. The choice is not between XML and yet another home-
rolled data format, but between XML and every other data format currently in
existence. When compared against JSON, YAML, or s-exps XML always seems wrong
for machine->machine communication.

