
Can We Do Better Than XML and JSON? - josephscott
http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/08/can-we-do-better-than-xml-and-json.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+oreilly%2Fnews+%28O%27Reilly+News+and+Commentary%29
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toyg
Binary is the enemy of View Source, with all that it entails. Tou think code
is self-documenting and you only use FORTRAN because anything invented after
1990 is rubbish? Can't interop. Your schema doc is a bit out of date? Can't
interop. Your schema is under NDA? Can't interop. Your competing standard is
plaintext? You've already lost. And so on, and so on.

The search for network efficiency is often just premature optimization.

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KaiserPro
yes.

There is a time and place for both XML and JSON. Making a website? want to
create a data feed for web type stuff? JSON away.

Work in enterprise world? perhaps you like JRR tolkien? XML is your friend.

Working in mobile/embedded/low bandwidth applications? no, XML/JSON is not
your friend.<edit> unless you don't care about network/power
efficiency.</edit>

I know Binary protocols strike fear into the hearts of programmers, but what
is JSON? its a string of binary. Its just there happens to be lots of lovely
tools to make it dirt simple.

as with all things there is a tradeoff. You need fast low latency interchange
of large amount of data? Binary, and yes you'll need to make a schema first. I
know it sounds a lot like planning, but trust me, giving real structure to
your data will save you weeks in debugging later.

just want to send and address to javascript? well hello JSON.

The example that is given there, is just utterly horrible. however if it works
and is easy, then who cares? its only a problem if you need to scale. But then
you've got bigger issues.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I laughed at this line: "Work in enterprise world? perhaps you like JRR
tolkien? XML is your friend."

Thank you :)

