Part of me is with you. But even in established languages I've had trouble finding an appropriate xml parser and had to tweak them way more than I thought necessary. I haven't (yet) had that problem with JSON.
I think with something like feeds there's the possible benefit of becoming a 'hello world' for frameworks. Many frameworks have you write a simple blogging engine or twitter copycat. I don't think I've ever seen that for a feed reader/publisher. People have said that Twitter clients were an interesting playground for new UI concepts and paradigms because the basics were so simple (back when their API keys were less restrictive). Maybe this could be that?
But even in established languages I've had trouble finding an appropriate xml parser and had to tweak them way more than I thought necessary. I haven't (yet) had that problem with JSON.
Maybe it's just that I work mostly with JVM languages (Java, Groovy, etc.) but I haven't had any problems with handling XML - including Atom - in years. But I admit that other platforms might not have the same degree of support.
Most of my experience is from Python. Each time I use it I have to look at the docs for etree (a library that ships with Python). We would hit performance and feature support issues with etree and tried lxml but had binary compatibility issues between our environments.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python[1] (a popular reference for Python) recommends untangle[2] and xmltodict[3], neither of which I've used.
I feel like in other languages I've used had similar brittleness when dealing with xml. I might be biased because working with xml in an editor it's difficult to validate visually or grok in general when used in practice.
Oh yes, I've used Beautiful Soup, too. If I remember correctly I had great luck with html, but issues with xml. It also is only a reader, not a writer.
All languages have XML parsers, it's more that a lot suck, they might have weird concepts you have to use, or are constantly tripping you up with namespaces, or make it really hard to write xpath queries.
If that's putting the bar high, I really think I may be suffering a huge disconnect from the rest of my peers in terms of expected capabilities.
Just because JSON doesn't have namespacing-capabilities at all, doesn't make it a worthless feature. It's actually what gives you the eXtensibility in XML. As a developer I expect you to understand that.
(And I wonder how long time it will take before the JS-world re-implements this XML-wheel, while again doing so with a worse implementation)
The reason why many developers hate XML namespaces isn't the concept but the implementations which force you to repeat yourself everywhere. I think a significant amount of the grumbling would go away if XPath parsers were smart enough to assume that //tag was the same as //default-and-only-namespace:tag, or at least allowed you to use //name:tag instead of //{URI}tag because then you could write against the document as it exists rather than mentally having to translate names everywhere.
Yes, you can write code to add default namespaces when the document author didn't include them and pass in namespace maps everywhere but that's a lot of tedious boilerplate which requires regular updating as URLs change. Over time, people sour on that.
It really makes me wonder what it'd be like now if anyone had made an effort to invest in making the common XML tools more usable and other maintenance so e.g. you could actually rely on using XPath 2+.
> (And I wonder how long time it will take before the JS-world re-implements this XML-wheel, while again doing so with a worse implementation)
I'm going to guess never. I'm also going to guess that there isn't a single flamewar in the entire history of JSON where someone was trying to figure out how to implement anything close to XML namespaces in JSON. And by "close", I mean something that would require changes to JSON parsers and/or downstream APIs to accommodate potentially bipartite keys.
It's for making interoperable APIs, so there is a good motivation for namespaces. But the namespaces are much less intrusive than XML namespaces. Ordinary API consumers don't even have to see them.
One of the key design goals of JSON-LD was that -- unlike its dismal ancestor, RDF/XML -- it should produce APIs that people actually want to use.
But that's not a case of adding namespaces to JSON, is it?
What I mean is if one were to take the skeptical position that JSON is going to end up "re-inventing the XML wheel", that would mean JSON advocates would need to push namespaces into the JSON spec as a core feature of the format. I've never read a discussion of such an idea, but I'd like to if they exist.
Well, yeah, perhaps the craziest thing about XML is that it has namespaces built into its syntax with no realistic model of how or why you would be mashing up different sources of XML tags.
Namespaces are about the semantics of what strings refer to. They belong in a layer with semantics, like JSON-LD, not in the definition of the data transfer format.
I am convinced that nobody would try to add namespaces to JSON itself. Just about everyone can tell how bad an idea that would be.
> Well, yeah, perhaps the craziest thing about XML is that it has namespaces built into its syntax with no realistic model of how or why you would be mashing up different sources of XML tags.
The thing that gets me is that they were added to XML, so the downstream APIs then got mirrored interfaces like createElementNS and setAttributeNS that cause all sorts of subtle problems. With SVG, for example, this generates at least two possible (and common) silent errors-- 1) the author creates the SVG in the wrong namespace, and/or 2) more likely, the author mistakenly sets the attribute in the SVG namespace when it should be created in the default namespace. These errors are made worse by the fact that there is no way to fetch that long SVG namespace string from the DOM window (aside from injecting HTML and querying the result)-- judging from Stackexchange users are manually typing it (often with typos) into their program and generating errors that way, too.
Worse, as someone on this site pointed out, multiple inline SVGs can still have attributes that easily suffer from namespace clashes in the <defs> section. It's almost comical-- the underlying format has a way to prevent nameclashes with multiple attributes inside a single tag that share the same name-- setAttributeNS-- but is no help at all in this area.
I think with something like feeds there's the possible benefit of becoming a 'hello world' for frameworks. Many frameworks have you write a simple blogging engine or twitter copycat. I don't think I've ever seen that for a feed reader/publisher. People have said that Twitter clients were an interesting playground for new UI concepts and paradigms because the basics were so simple (back when their API keys were less restrictive). Maybe this could be that?