
XML Backlash? - 13ren
http://www.ajaxonomy.com/2008/xml/xml-backlash
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dissenter
XML is an embarrassment. It solves no problem: not even the problem of
agreeing on how to represent data. The only thing it does is give programmers
something recognizable to fiddle with, however irrelevant to the problem it
may be.

Most religious wars in computer science hinge on matters of taste. If you
prefer emacs to vi, maybe that's just your style. If you prefer PHP to Ruby,
there may be several good reasons why.

There is no such ambiguity in the case of XML. If you prefer XML to _anything
but XML_ , you don't know what you're talking about. You should have no say in
anything that affects other programmers.

We're in this mess because of the unforeseen popularity of the web. When the
web was created, its designers chose a simple and not particularly good markup
language. Then the web grew, and instead of everybody recognizing the language
as bad and replacing it, we turned a blind eye to its faults and kept it
around.

The immense popularity of the web has glossed over all the deficiencies
present in markup languages. People can't imagine that anything that built the
internet might have something wrong with it. The internet is good, so anything
that built the internet must be good as well.

Markup language was ill-conceived. Generalizing it into XML was folly.

How can you possibly take XML seriously? How do you squeeze an entire blog
post out of it? Have you never bothered to look at the technology? The author
is obviously capable of writing a coherent, well-thought out essay. Did he
never stop and look at what he was doing and go, "This is a whole lot of
shit!"

~~~
utnick
Maybe I am missing something, but I think thats a little extreme...

If I have some data structures that I am trying to send from my C# windows app
to your java unix app, how would you propose we do that?

With XML, we can easily agree and collaborate on a format and both of our
languages have builtin libraries to extract the data we need.

Its easy to build and easy to debug.

~~~
dissenter
OK, I'm going to send you a list using XML.

Now how do you propose we do that?

 _This is entirely the problem. The XML didn't solve anything. We still have
to negotiate the terms of the transfer. We've agreed to use XML, true, but we
are still at square one._

~~~
olavk
Of course you have to negotiate the terms of the transfer. You have to do that
using any format (custom binary, XML, JSON, s-expressions, whatever). XML just
defines a lot of common syntactic stuff which you would have to define anyway
in any format you decide on.

~~~
sah
I would argue that there's very little value in standardizing that syntactic
stuff. Whatever tiny amount of value there might be is probably destroyed by
picking a convention as almost universally inappropriate as XML.

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ComputerGuru
It's not as dramatic as the article makes it seem.

XML is and was a great solution far a huge number of things. Overexcited
developers were tad too eager to put it to use for things outside its true
scope (regardless of what it was marketed as), and now they're realizing that
there are better alternatives _for those particular applications_.

XML was and still remains an excellent solution for the problem it originally
solved: a joint human _and_ machine readable markup language.

~~~
ajross
Uh... a _tad_ too eager? Dude, we crossed that threshold with Ant or JSP. By
the time XSLT and XQuery rolled around, we were looking at a full-on stampede
of developer group-think.

XSLT happens to be my pet peeve. I simply can't understand how anyone would
have ever looked at that problem ("how to turn a source data document into a
presentation format" -- something that has been solved sanely a thousand times
by obscure technologies like "scripts", or "PHP") and decided that the best
way to handle it was a turing-complete pattern matching language written in
XML itself! I mean, it looks more like a torture device than a programming
language...

~~~
bct
I know that it's perverse, but XSLT's actually kind of fun if you're not doing
anything terribly complex.

~~~
thwarted
So you're saying that XSLT makes the simple things fun and the complex things
terrible?

~~~
bct
Pretty much. It's certainly more fun than DOM for simple transformations.

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michaelneale
XML is popular simply because HTML made the web happen. XML looked like HTML
so people understood what it was for immediately, and then it got overused.

Thats about all there is to it.

