The Future of XML 273
An anonymous reader writes "How will you use XML in years to come? The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The outline of XML's future is becoming clear. The exact timeline is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn't. XML's future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing. 'Word processors, spreadsheets, games, diagramming tools, and more are all migrating into the browser. This trend will only accelerate in the coming year as local storage in Web browsers makes it increasingly possible to work offline. But XML is still firmly grounded in Web 1.0 publishing, and that's still very important.'"
"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:5, Interesting)
JSON/YAML is/are better (not considering, of course, the variety and maturity of available tools; but then, perhaps, you don't always need most of what is out there in XML tools, either) for lots of things (mostly, the kinds of things TFA notes XML wasn't designed for and often isn't the best choice for),things that aren't marked-up text. Where you actually want an extensible language for text-centric markup, rather than a structured format for interchange of something that isn't marked-up text, XML seems to be a pretty good choice. Of course, for some reason, that seems to be a minority of the uses of XML.
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Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:4, Insightful)
JSON is inflicting Javascript on everyone. There are other programming languages out there. Also, XML can painlessly create meta-documents made up of other people's XML documents.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:5, Informative)
No, it really doesn't, but if "JavaScript" in the name bothers you, you might feel better with YAML.
And there are JSON and/or YAML libraries for quite a lot of them. So what?
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it wouldn't because JSON is bare bones data. It's simply nested hash tables, arrays and strings. XML does much more than that. XML can represent a lot of information in a simple, easy-to-understand format. JSON strips it out for speed & efficiency. Which sort of gets into the point I did want to make but was too impatient to explain: JSON is good where JSON is best, and XML is good where XML is best. I dislike the one-uber-alles arguments because it's ignoring other situations and their needs.
Would you like to live in a world of S-expressions [wikipedia.org]? The LISP people would point out there are libraries to read/write S-expressions, so why use JSON? The answer of course is that we want more than simply nesting lists of strings. We want our markup languages to fit our requirements, not the other way around. And saying "JSON for Everything", which the original poster did was... silly.
My problems with JSON are:
JSON is great for AJAX where XML is clunky and a little bit slower (my own speed tests hasn't shown there's a huge hit, but it is significant). XML is great for document-type data like formatted documents or electronic data interchange between heavy-weight processes. My point was that the original poster's JSON is everything was narrow-minded, and that XML answers a very specific need. There are tonnes of mark-up languages out there, and I think XML is a great machine-based language. I hate it when humans have to write XML to configure something though. That really ticks me off. But that's the point: there should not be one mark-up language to rule them all. A mark-up language for every purpose.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:4, Insightful)
One file (format) will not rule them all.
XML is good if you want to design a communication protocol between your software, and some other unknown program.
JSON is much lighter. Far less kilobits needed to transfer the same information so when performance is important and you control everything then use JSON.
When it comes to humans editing config files I find traditional ini files, or
Writing more complex, relational data to disk? Sqlite often solves the problem quickly.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:5, Funny)
If you're giving me a choice... why yes, please! Where can I get one of these worlds you're talking about?
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:4, Interesting)
It is extremely powerful tool, I once (ages ago) made a pure XSLT implementation to convert XML into C. Whith a CSS the XSLT was even browser/human viewable (the output was somewhat similar to the C program output).
I do not think JSON can do that.
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You forgot XSLT.
It is extremely powerful tool, I once (ages ago) made a pure XSLT implementation to convert XML into C. Whith a CSS the XSLT was even browser/human viewable (the output was somewhat similar to the C program output).
I do not think JSON can do that.
XSLT is a nice backwards chaining theorem prover, very similar to Prolog. I like it and use it a lot - currently for me it venerates SQL, Hibernate mappings, C# code and Velocity macros from a single source XML document. But there's nothing magic about it, and if we didn't have XSLT it would be very easy to do the same sort of thing in LISP or Prolog, or (slightly more awkwardly) in conventional programming languages.
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Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Pop quiz. Here's an excerpt of GML from that page you linked to.Do the contents of this node represent:
- the text string "100,200"
- the number 100200 (with a customary comma for nice formatting)
- the number 100.2 (hey, that's the way that the crazy Europeans do it)
- a tuple of two numbers: 100 and 200
"Obviously it's two numbers, they're coordinates" you may say. But such things are not "obvious" to an XML parser. If you're an XML parser the answer is (1): it's a simple text string. So to get to the real data you have to parse that text string again to split on a comma, and to turn the two resulting text strings into numbers. Note this is a completely separate parser and is completely outside the XML data model, so all your fancy schema validation, xpath, etc. are useless to access data at this level.Why all this pain? Because XML simply has no way to say "this is a list of things" or "this is a number."
Sure, you can approximate such things. You could write something like:But the fact remains that even though you may intuitively understand this to be two coordinates when you look at it (and at least you can select the coordinates individually with xpath in this example, but they're still strings, not numbers) to XML this is still nothing but a tree of nodes.
Did you catch that? A tree of nodes. You're taking a concept which is logically a pair of integers, and encoding it in a format that's representing it in a tree of nodes. Specifically, that tree looks something like this:
elementNode name=gml:coordinates
\-> textNode, text="\n " *
\-> elementNode name=gml:coordinateX
\-> textNode text="100"
\-> textNode, text="\n " *
\-> elementNode name=gml:coordinateY
\-> textNode, text="200"
\-> textNode, text="\n" *
(*: yep, it keeps all that whitespace that you only intended for formatting. XML is a text markup language, so all text anywhere in the document is significant to the parser.)
So let's recap. Using XML, we've taken a structure which is logically just a pair of integers and encoded it as a tree of 7 nodes, three of which are meaningless whitespace that was only put there for formatting, and even after all this XML has no clue that what we're dealing with is a pair of integers.
Now let's try this example in JSON:JSON knows two things that your fancy shmancy XML parser will never know: that 100 and 200 are numbers, and that they are two elements of an array (which might be more appropriately thought of as a "tuple" in this context). It's smart enough to know that the whitespace is not significant, it doesn't build this complex and meaningless node tree; it just lets you express, directly and succinctly, the data you are trying to encode.
That's because JSON is a data format, and XML is a marked up text format. But we're suffering from the fact that no one realized this ten years ago, and compensated for the parity mismatch by layering mountains of horribly complex software on top of XML instead of just using something that is actually good at data interchange.
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:4, Insightful)
The only difference here is that XML separates these 3 (markup, validation, transformation) operations, since you might find situations where you don't need all of them.
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Also, this isn't just a matter of validation. It's a matter of actually being able to access the structure of the data you're trying to encode. OK, so let's
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Yes in fact I did. That's what I was referring to when I talked about the "mountains of horribly complex software" on top of XML.
[0.5k of RDF that expresses 100, 200 as integer coordinates]
Simple enough.
Thank you for expressing so succinctly exactly why I am so depressed. How did you XML people come to have such low standards? How can you call "simple enough" a fragment of code that ta
Re:"How will you use XML in years to come?" (Score:4, Insightful)
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XML Schema may let the other end validate it, but it doesn't let the other end make sense of it. The other end can only make sense of it if they've got code written to handle the kind of data it contains: which is true, really, of any data format.
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"You might feel better..." -> "No, it wouldn't..."? WTF is that supposed to mean? How is taht even a response to what precedes it?
"JSON is..." -> "XML does much more than that." Again, this is incoherent. XML is simply tree-structure
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On the browser? If you want to use AJAX-like technology, JavaScript is still the only viable and portable option as the programming language for the client side.
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Beyond that scope comparing these two unrelated "things" is irrelevant.
The tools and libraries available for XML go well beyond JSON's scope. DOM [w3.org], RSS & ATOM [intertwingly.net], OASIS, Xpath, XSLT, eXist DB [sourceforge.net] are just few examples of tools and libraries surrounding XML.
XML is designed to le
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While I understand your pain, XML is still a very nice *markup* language, for marking up documents and simple content trees.
Can you imagine HTML / XHTML implemented as JSON? I doubt that.
The fault with people here lies in XML abuse, namely SOAP-like XML API-s and using XML for everything, where binary formats, or more compact and simpler formats, like JSON, do better.
WARNING: GNAA (Score:3, Informative)
You know the saying (Score:5, Funny)
I believe that this was what you were looking for. (Score:2)
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20050313.html [schlockmercenary.com]
I don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a programmer, just like the rest of you here, so I'm quite used to having to write a parser here or there, or fixing an issue or two in an ant script. The thing that puzzles me, is why it's used so much on the web. XML is bulky, and when designed badly it can be far too complex; this all adds to bandwidth and processing on the client (think AJAX), so I'm not seeing why anyone would want to use it. Formats like JSON are just as usable, and not to mention more lightweight. Where's the gain?
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Re:I don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Looks a lot like HTML. "Oh, it has angle brackets, I know this!"
2. Inertia.
3. Has features that make it a good choice for business: schemas and validation, transforms, namespaces, a type system.
4. Inertia.
There just isn't that much need to switch. Modern parsers/hardware make the slowness argument moot, and everyone knows how to work with it.
As an interchange format with javascript (and other dynamically typed languages) it is sub-optimal for a number of reasons, and so an alternative, JSON has developed which fills that particular niche. But when I sit down to right yet another line of business app, my default format is going to be XML, and will be for the foreseeable future.
Re:I don't understand... (Score:4, Funny)
For the majority of applications that use it, it's overboard.
You mean like this? [thedailywtf.com]
Re:I don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
XML gives you a parsable standard on two levels; generic XML syntax and specific to your protocol via schemas. It's verbose enough to allow by-hand manual editing while the syntax will catch any errors save semantic errors you'll likely have. It's also a little more versatile as far as the syntax goes. Yes, there are less verbose parsing syntaxes out there, but you always seem to lose something when it comes to manual viewing or editing.
Plus, as far as writing parsers, why burn the time when there are so many tools for XML out there? It's a design choice I suppose like every other one; i.e. what are you losing/gaining by DIYing? Personally, I love XML and regret that it hasn't taken off more. Especially in the area of network protocols. People have been trying to shove everything into an HTML pipe, when XML over the much underrated BEEP is a far more versatile. There are costs, though as you've already mentioned.
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Oh please. Its bad enough having this bloated standard in data files , but please don't start quadrupaling the amount of bits that need to be sent down a pipe to send the same amount of data just so it can be XML. XML is an extremely poor format to use for any kind of streamed data because you have to read a large chunk of it to find suitable boundaries to process. Not good for efficiency or code simplicity. And if you say "so what" to that then you've obviously
Re:I don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
However, the modern programming age is all about sacrificing performance for convenience (this is why virtually no one is using C or C++ to make web apps, and almost everyone is using a significantly poorer performing language like Python or Ruby). We've got powerful computers with tons of RAM and hard drive space, and high-speed internet connections that can transmit vast amounts of data in mere seconds; why waste (valuable programmer) time and energy over-optimizing everything?
Instead, developers choose the option that will make their lives easier. XML is widely known, easily understood, and is human readable. I can send an XML document, without any schema or documentation, to another developer and they'll be able to "grok it". There's also a ton of tools out there for working with XML; if someone sends me a random XML document, I can see it syntax colored in Eclipse or my browser. If someone sends me an XML schema, I can use JAXB to generate Java classes to interact with it. If I need to reformat/convert ANY XML document, I can just whip up an XSLT for it and I'm done.
So yes, other formats offer some benefits. But XML's universality (which does require a bit of bulkiness) makes it a great choice for most types of data one would like to markup and/or transmit.
P.S. JSON is just as usable? Try writing a schema to validate it
Same deal with transformations: if you want to alter your JSON data in a consistent way, you have to again write custom code every time. Sure XSLT has a learning curve, but once you master it you can accomplish in a few lines of code what any other language would need tens or even hundreds of lines to do.
Re:I don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's a standard that everyone (even reluctantly) can agree on.
Because there are well-debugged libraries for reading, writing and manipulating it.
Because (as a last resort) text is easy to manipulate with scripting languages like perl and python.
Because if verbosity is a problem, text compresses very well.
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Re:I don't understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, yeah, when I was a kid, we all worked in hand-optimized C and assembler, and tried to pack useful information into each bit of storage, but systems were a lot smaller and a lot more expensive back then. These days, I write perl or python scripts that spit out forty bytes of XML to encode a single boolean flag, and it doesn't even faze me. Welcome to the 21st century.
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so programmers don't have to see or care how much overhead is involved
Which is how we got to the point where, Dr. Dewar and Dr. Schonberg [af.mil]:
And you're saying overhead doesn't matter?
Re:I don't understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
XML is, in many cases (including mine), the path of least resistance. It's not particularly fast or efficient, but it's simple and quick and I don't have to spend hours documenting my formats for the dozens of other people in the company who have to use my data. Many of whom are probably not programmers by Dewar and Schonberg's definition, but who still do valuable work for the company.
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How do you know if what you've done actually gets the job done? Any monkey can type away randomly and get something done, but it's usually not the job that actually needs doing. For that, you need the skills academic work teaches.
You missed the point of studying sorting algorithms. They are taught not so that you can reimplement a quicksort later in life, they are taught because they are a great no-frills case study of the basic concepts you need to get a job done while knowing that you got t
Re:I don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
-Easily validated
-Easily parsed
-Easily compressed (in transit or stored)
-Human readable in case of emergency
-Easily extendable
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Which just means that it has lots of redundancy. Or, as one might call it, bloat.
Re:I don't understand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which just means that it has lots of redundancy. Or, as one might call it, bloat.
1. Spending a few hours coding your formats in some binary format making maximum use of all the bits.
2. Spending a few minutes writing code to send your internal data structure to a library that will serialize it into XML and then running the XML through a generic compression routine (if space/speed actually makes any difference to your particular application).
Consider the question in both the short and the long term. Also consider that you're paying that programmer a few hundred an hour.
Discuss.
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Which just means that it has lots of redundancy. Or, as one might call it, bloat.
Test question: Which is quicker?
1. Spending a few hours coding your formats in some binary format making maximum use of all the bits.
2. Spending a few minutes writing code to send your internal data structure to a library that will serialize it into XML and then running the XML through a generic compression routine (if space/speed actually makes any difference to your particular application).
Consider the question in both the short and the long term. Also consider that you're paying that programmer a few hundred an hour.
Discuss.
or...
3. Spending a few minutes writing code to send your internal data structure to a library that will serialize it into YAML and then NOT running the YAML through a generic compression routine (since YAML has far less bloat and therefore far less need for compression).
I think I'll go for option 3.
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>> 1. Spending a few hours coding your formats in some binary format making maximum use of all the bits.
>> 2. Spending a few minutes writing code to send your internal data structure to a library that will serialize it into XML and then running the XML through a generic compression routine (if space/speed actually makes any difference to your particular application).
A while back (before XML parsers were common) I built a kinda cool system whereby a mainfr
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-it doesn't affect transit time when compressed
-it minimally takes more cpu to gunzip a stream, but the same could be said of translating ANY binary format (unless you're sending direct memory dumps, which is dangerous)
-it's never really in memory as the entire point is to serialize/deserialize
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Our biggest usage is in our customer data feeds. These feeds are often 1GB+ when compressed. Since switching to an XML format from a tab-delimited format, we've been able to gi
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Let's say you need to store data, and a database is not an option. What format shall you store it in?
1 & 2 are untried, untested, and it is not possible to fi
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But it isn't and doesn't... (Score:2)
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Because XML is a standard. Almost all languages have a standards compliant XML parser that you can easily use. Why invent a new format and a parser, when you can use an existing standard that has most of the issues already sorted out? You don't have to spend time working out if a bug is caused by your parser or something else. XML handles things like character escaping, unicode, etc gracefully whereas a format you design may not unless you spend a lot of time on it.
Formats like JSON are just as usab
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Why? You can perform XSL transformations on the server and return plain HTML.
Why XML is so popular (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a lot of experience consulting with various organizations - some Fortune 500, some nonprofit, some educational - about their software selection process. I've watched many times as a vendor gives a presentation to my employer or client talking about how wonderous it is that their software saves all its data in XML so y
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Maybe another comparison would help: QWERTY vs. Dvorak. The one "everyone" knows and uses - and, incidentally, design keyboard shortcuts according to; I'm looking at you, Vim - was designed to avoid jams in mechanical keyboards [wikipedia.org] way back in the ass-end of time, while the other was designed to be efficient on electronic hardware.
A "Dvorak solution" for XML would have to solve some fundamental problem while keeping all the good attributes (no pun intended) of the original. IMO, that would mean more readable c
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It can't be processed with the likes of awk and sed.
Just because you can't use tools made for processing text in Unix line-based format, doesn't mean there aren't tools for this purpose. You can even find tools inspired on awk for XML processing, like xmlgawk [sourceforge.net] (also here [vrweb.de]).
However...
I agree with you that XML is not the answer for everything. For instance, I just hate XML configuration files, exactly because you can't reliably grep, sed, awk, ex, them. Editing XML with vi is not the nicest task either. For config files I usually like INI-style files, for
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For some config files, XML is the easiest way to go. I wrote an app that stores the entire hierarchy of the GUI's frames, panels, and values as nested nodes of XML. The app then looks at those XML nodes and recreates itself accordingly when loading the config. Using python's xml.dom.minidom [python.org] makes it easier to work with.
I agree that in most cases it is overkill, if you know exactly which values need to go where, python's config parser is much easier and the resulting files are smaller.
Regarding CSV fi
Why is XML so popular (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Why is XML so popular (Score:4, Funny)
Funny, that. I've heard LISPers say "XML looks quite like LISP, only uglier."
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Why not store it as a tree in a format computers can parse efficiently? Invent binary format with parent and child offsets and binary tags for the names and values. It's smaller in memory and faster. Better basically. You don't need to parse them if machines are going to read them. And decent human programmers can read them with a debugger or from a hexdump in a file, or write a tool to dump them as a human friendly ASCII during develop
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I like this way much more than coming up with something new because it means I'd be able to keep my XML generating shell scripts, and just filter the output through a text to binary converter.
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Much Ado About Nothing... (Score:4, Interesting)
They've been saying that for years, and frankly it won't happen. A vast amount of users relish the control that having software stored and run locally provides. Of course there will always be exceptions as web based e-mail has shown us.
As far as the future of XML... I can't seem to find anything in this article that states anything more than the obvious, it's on the same path it's been on for quite some time.
FTA:
Is that news to anyone? My understanding of XML is that it's intended use is to provide information, about the information.
The thing with XML (Score:3, Interesting)
I had someone call me up to design them a simple web app. But he wanted it coded in XML because he thought that was the technology he wanted. His Access database was not web frendly enough.
I did correct him a little to put him in check and atleast gave him the right buzz words to use to the next guy.
I think XML is dead simple to use if used correctly. I do like it much better that ini files. That is about all I use it for now. Easy to use config files that others have to use.
Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments (Score:5, Interesting)
I first heard about XML years ago when it was new, and just the concept sucked to me. A markup language based on the ugly and unwieldy syntax of SGML (from which HTML derives)? We don't need more SGML-alikes, we need fewer, was my thought. This stuff sucks.
Then a while later I actually had to use XML. I read up on its design and features and thought, OK well at least the cool bit is that it has DTDs to describe the specifics of a domain of XML. But then I found out that DTDs are incomplete to the extreme, unable to properly specify large parts of what one should be able to specify with it. And on top of that, DTDs don't even use XML syntax - what the hell? This stuff sucks.
I then found that there were several competing specifications for XML-based replacements for the DTD syntax, and none were well-accepted enough to be considered the standard. So I realized that there was going to be no way to avoid fragmentation and incompatibility in XML schemas. This stuff sucks.
I spent some time reading through supposedly 'human readable' XML documents, and writing some. Both reading and writing XML is incredibly nonsuccinct, error-prone, and time consuming. This stuff sucks.
Finally I had to write some code to read in XML documents and operate on them. I searched around for freely available software libraries that would take care of parsing the XML documents for me. I had to read up on the 'SAX' and 'DOM' models of XML parsing. Both are ridiculously primitive and difficult to work with. This stuff sucks.
Of course I found the most widely distributed, and probably widely used, free XML parser (using the SAX style), expat. It is not re-entrant, because XML syntax is so ridiculously and overly complex that people don't even bother to write re-entrant parsers for it. So you have to dedicate a thread to keeping the stack state for the parser, or read the whole document in one big buffer and pass it to the parser. XML is so unwieldy and stupid that even the best freely available implementations of parsers are lame. This stuff sucks.
Then I got bitten by numerous bugs that occurred because XML has such weak syntax; you can't easily limit the size of elements in a document, for example, either in the DTD (or XML schema replacement) or expat. You just gotta accept that the parser could blow up your program if someone feeds it bad data, because the parser writers couldn't be bothered to put any kind of controls in on this, probably because they were 'thinking XML style', which basically means, not thinking much at all. This stuff sucks.
Finally, my application had poor performance because XML is so slow and bloated to read in as a wire protocol. This stuff sucks.
XML sucks in so many different ways, it's amazing. In fact I cannot think of a single thing that XML does well, or a single aspect of it that couldn't have been better planned from the beginning. I blame the creators of XML, who obviously didn't really have much of a clue.
In summary - XML sucks, and I refuse to use it, and actively fight against it every opportunity I get.
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As long as you guys want to fit the bill for supporting that shoddy format, go right ahead!
interoperability is overrated.
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An example of nonstandard constraints you have to put on your parser - DTD doesn't al
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<foo>{100 megabytes of the letter 'a'}</foo>
And the second was supposed to be:
<{100 MB of 'a'}>hello</foo>
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad I used up all my mod points earlier...this post deserves a +1 Insightful.
I was just a neophyte developer when XML first surfaced in buzzword bingo, but it was the beginning of my realization of how to recognize a "Kool-aid" technology: if the people who espouse a technology can not give you a simple explanation of what it is and why it's good, they are probably "drinking the "Kool-aid".
Unfortunately, I also have since discovered the unsettling corollary: you will have it forced down your throat anyway.
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Use Lisp and s-expressions.
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Not "free", but believe it or not,
Then I got bitten by numerous bugs that occurred because XML has such weak syntax
Based on the exhibited behavior, I suspect virtually all programs that parse XML use SelectSingleNode() (or comparable). And there we have a problem, in that XML itself doesn't require node uniquenes
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While I share your disdain (and I agree with everyone of your points), the question is this - What other *standard* way do we have to describe a format that has *moderate to high* level of complexity. JSON is great when I don't need to apply any constraints on the data. I would gladly choose it (along wit
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To pick just a few of your actual points...
Why on earth would you use a separate thread. SAX callbacks allow you ample opportunity to maintain whatever state you need and DOM parsers cache the entire thing into a hierarchy that you can navigate to avoid having to maintain any state of your own. Granted, the us
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Actually, you are demonstrating some cluelessness here. Size bloat is only a small part of why XML massively sucks as a wire protocol compared to functionally equivalent universal representations such as ASN.
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There's so many more readable formats like json. Or just using byte offsets. Hell we could being using pipe delimited data.
the creators of XML made it for document markup (Score:2)
XML was never intended as a data storage format. It was intended as a document markup format. The fact that people started immediately using it for arbitrary data came as a surprise to the people who created it.
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However, I believe that XML isn't even good for marking up textual documents and data. It would be faster, smaller, and less error prone for computers if it were an intelligently defined binary format. It would be easier for humans to read and write as a non-SGML-based format. I think the correct thing that XML should have been is a format which has both a bi
A Buzzword's Life (Score:5, Funny)
Probably a long, healthy life in a big house on the top of buzzword hill, funded by many glowing articles in magazines like InformationWeek and CIO, and 'research papers' by Gartner. Sitting on the porch yelling, "Get off my lawn!" to upstarts like SOA, AJAX, and VOIP. Hanging out watching tube with cousin HTML and poor cousin SGML. Trying to keep JSON and YAML from breaking in and swiping his stuff. Then fading into that same retirement community that housed such oldsters as EDI, VMS, SNA, CICS, RISC, etc.
We're stuck with XML for a loooong time (Score:3, Interesting)
All these things are why people use it.
All these things are why people abuse it.
All these things are why we won't be able to get rid of it soon.
TFA has nothing to say about the future of XML but the tools to use XML. XQuery and XML databases. Whoopity do. The threshold for getting posted on
YAML (Score:3, Informative)
If only there was a standardized format that combined these advantages, without all that XML bloat. There is! Try YAML [yaml.org].
XML's big win is supposed to be its semantics: it tells you not only what data you have, but what sort of data it is. This allows you to create all sorts of dreamy scenarios about computers being able to understand each other and act super intelligently. In reality, it leads to massively bloated XML specifications and protracted fights over what's the best way to describe one's data, but not to any of the magic.
As my all time favorite Slashdot sig said: "XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it."
JSON is S-expressions done wrong (Score:2)
JSON is almost exactly equivalent to LISP S-expressions. Unfortunately, JSON has major security problems due to a Javascript design error. In LISP, there's the "reader", which takes in a string, parses it, and generates a tree structure (or graph; there's a way to express cross-links), and just returns the data structure. Then lISP has "eval", which takes a data structure created by the reader and runs it.
Javascript combines both functions into one, called "eval", which takes a string, parses it, and
Based on the fact that it's text... (Score:2)
It's not rocket science - MS were using it in MediaPlayer long before EkksEmmEll came along... it was called "sticking your crap in angle brackets and parsing it" - HTML is a subset of SGML and I'm pretty sure that it (in its XHTML form) will be around for a while yet.
How does that die out? Just because you give it a name and rant about standards in some poxy white paper/media blag doesn't mean it's going to die and go away...
XML tables (Score:2)
We once had to port live data from Texas to Oregon from giant tables repeatedly, not too well built. So we looked to send XML, enforcing a DTD/schema on the sender teams. We ended up writing the encoders because we used an early and crude compression scheme:
We took the source table and counted the number of duplicate sets per column, then returned sorted data in order of highest duplicates to lowest.
Then, we encoded in XML using a column, then row order. Scanning dow
Graveyard (Score:2)
Why not S-expressions? (Score:4, Interesting)
For example:
<tag1>
<tag2>
<tag3/>
</tag2>
<tag1>
becomes:
(tag1
(tag2
(tag3)
)
)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, you can build a different text representation for XML as sexps. But if it represents the same thing, it doesn't much matter.
Imagine that you do so, and you can write a function P that takes xml into sexps and a function Q that takes it back. If Q(P(xml-stuff)) == xml-stuff and P(Q(sexps)) == sexps, then they both do the same thing and you can effectively use either syntax. So you use the syntax you want and convert when you need to. Of course, if either equality doesn't work, then one syntax
Concise XML (Score:2)
Don't get blindsided by big stuff you can't see (Score:4, Informative)
WHATWG's HTML 5 and JSON will have no effect on these other uses. It's just that nobody in hangouts like this sees it.
For example, the entire international banking industry runs on XML Schemas. Here's one such standard: IFX. Look at a few links: http://www.csc.com/industries/banking/news/11490.shtml [csc.com] , http://www.ifxforum.org/home [ifxforum.org] , http://www.ifxforum.org/home [ifxforum.org]
But there are other XML standards in use in banking.
The petroleum industry is a heavy user of XML. Example: Well Information Transfer Standard Markup Language WITSML (http://www.knowsys.com/ and others).
The list goes on and on, literally, in major, world-wide industry after industry. XML has become like SQL -- it was new, it still has plenty of stuff going on and smart people are working on it, but a new generation of programmers has graduated from high school, and reacts against it. But it's pure folly to think it's going to go away in favor of JSON or tag soup markup.
So yes, suceess in Facebook applications can make a few grad students drop out of school to market their "stuff," and Google can throw spitballs at Microsoft with a free spreadsheet written in Javascript, but when you right down to it, do you really think the banking industry, the petroleum industry, and countless others are going to roll over tomorrow and start hacking JSON?
Errrm, folks, what's the big fat hairy deal? (Score:5, Informative)
And for those of you out there who haven't yet noticed: XML sucks because data structure serialisation sucks. It allways will. You can't cut open, unravel and string out an n-dimensional net of relations into a 1-dimensional string of bits and bytes without it sucking in one way or the other. It's a, if not THE classic hard problem in IT. Get over it. It's with XML that we've finally agreed upon in which way it's supposed to suck. Halle-flippin'-luja! XML is the unified successor to the late sixties way of badly delimited literals, indifference between variables and values and flatfile constructs of obscure standards nobody wants. And which are so arcane by todays standards that they are beyond useless (Check out AICC if you don't know what I mean). Crappy PLs and config schemas from the dawn of computing.
That's all there is to XML: a universal n-to-1 serialisation standard. Nothing more and nothing less. Calm down.
And as for the headline: Of-f*cking-course it's here to stay. What do you want to change about it (much less 'enhance'). Do you want to start color-coding your data? Talking about the future of XML is allmost like talking about the future of the wheel ("Scientist ask: Will it ever get any rounder?"). Give me a break. I'm glad we got it and I'm actually - for once - gratefull to the academic IT community doing something usefull and pushing it. It's universal, can be handled by any class and style of data processing and when things get rough it's even human readable. What more do you want?
Now if only someone could come up with a replacement for SQL and enforce universal utf-8 everywhere we could finally leave the 1960s behind us and shed the last pieces of vintage computing we have to deal with on a daily basis. Thats what discussions like these should actually be about.
Re: (Score:2)
Just out of curiosity, have you ever had to work with EDI? Because you sound like someone who probably got burnt by something like that in the past
MOD PARENT UP! Re:Errrm, folks, what's the big (Score:2, Insightful)
Cheers, Qbertino. This is the best explanation of XML's raison d'etre I have ever heard.
I think what people might hate most is DTDs. That makes sense. Even their creator says they suck. There are many ways around them... Lisp can be one big full-service XML processor. Easily. With happy ending and no need for the DOM or SAX.
The bottom line is, XML is nothing (literally) until you spec YourML. And most people don't have a need for that! So it seems useless to them. If you are writing markup languages for
Re: (Score:2)
There are XSD alternatives, and also nice tools and editors to handle XSDs: then you're fine.
Also, having taken a look at the mainstream C++ APIs for XML, that would make most anyone hate it. It isn't bad in Java or
As always (Score:2)
Basically like any tool use where it makes most sense, avoid using it in other cases.
XML is a fad, STEP is the future (Score:5, Interesting)
Example:
#10=ORGANIZATION('O0001','LKSoft','company');
#11=PRODUCT_DEFINITION_CONTEXT('part definition',#12,'manufacturing');
#12=APPLICATION_CONTEXT('mechanical design');
#13=APPLICATION_PROTOCOL_DEFINITION('','automotive_design',2003,#12);
#14=PRODUCT_DEFINITION('0',$,#15,#11);
#15=PRODUCT_DEFINITION_FORMATION('1',$,#16);
#16=PRODUCT('A0001','Test Part 1','',(#18));
#17=PRODUCT_RELATED_PRODUCT_CATEGORY('part',$,(#16));
#18=PRODUCT_CONTEXT('',#12,'');
#19=APPLIED_ORGANIZATION_ASSIGNMENT(#10,#20,(#16));
#20=ORGANIZATION_ROLE('id owner');
Re: (Score:2)
Strange. I don't know why, but this STEP reminds me of BASIC. :-)
Is this supposed to be a step forward?
Wikipedia page for ISO STEP mentions that many consider replacing it with XML [wikipedia.org], or rather creating XML schemas to represent the information STEP does (I didn't find Wikipedia's external reference for this though).
...programs can process and present results of STEP incrementally instead of requiring closing tags...
It's not true that XML cannot be rendered incrementally. This Mozilla FAQ [mozilla.org] points out that versions before Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9 don't support it, which makes me believe that Firefox 3 does suppo
Make working with XML suck less... (Score:5, Interesting)
XML does suck if you stick with some of the W3C standards and common tools. Suggestions to make it less painful:
W3C Schema is painful; it forces object-oriented design concepts onto a hierarchical data model. Consider RELAX NG [relaxng.org] (an Oasis-approved standard) instead; it's delightful in comparison. Use the verbose XML syntax when communicating with the less technical - if you've seen XML before, it's pretty easy to comprehend:
Switch to the compact syntax when you're among geeks:
There's validation support on major platforms, and even a tool (Trang [thaiopensource.com]) to convert between verbose/compact formats, and output to DTD and W3C Schemas. And, if you need to specify data types, it borrows the one technology W3C Schema got right: the Datatypes library [w3.org].
The W3C DOM attempts to be a universal API, which means it must conform to the lowest common denominator in the programming languages it targets. Consider the NodeList [w3.org] interface:
While similar to the native list/collection/array interfaces most languages provide, it's not an exact match. So, DOM implementers create an object that doesn't work quite like any other collection on the platform. In Java, this means writing:
Instead of:
Dynamic languages allow an even more concise syntax. Consider this Ruby builder code to build a trivial XML document:
I thought about writing the W3C DOM equivalent of the above, but I'm not feeling masochistic tonight. Sorry.
The alternatives depend on your programming language, but plenty of choices exist for DOM-style traversal/manipulation.
In-memory object models of large XML document can consume a lot of resources, but often, you only need part of the data. Consider using an XMLPull [xmlpull.org] or StAX [codehaus.org] parser instead. Pull means you control the document traversal, only descending into (and fully parsing) sections of the XML that are of interest. SAX [saxproject.org] based parsers have equivalent capabilities, but the programming model is uncomfortable for many developers.
Even better, some Pull processors are wicked fast, even when using them to construct a DOM. In Winter 2006, I benchmarked an XML-heavy application, and found WoodStox [codehaus.org] to be an order of magnitude faster at constructing thousands of small DOM4J documents
XML in the frontend ... WTF???? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been working with XML ever since it first came out and the whole XML on the front-end is a fad that comes and goes periodically.
The pros of XML
Cons of XML
The pros and cons mean that the best place to use XML is for interoperability between systems/applications developed by different teams/vendors where not much data is sent around and processing is not time sensitive. This does cover some front-end applications where the data can be generated by a program done by one vendor and read by a program done by a different vendor. It does, however, not cover files which are meant to be written and read by the same application.
The second best place is to quickly add support for a tree structured storage format for data to an application (for example, for a config file), since you can just pick-up one of the XML libraries out there and half your file format problems will be solved (you still have to figure out and develop the "what to put in there" and "where to put it" part, but need not worry about most of the mechanics of generating, parsing and validating the file)
Re:XML needs to be easier to read (Score:5, Interesting)
At the game studio where I work, all our newest tools are written in C#, and use XML as a data source (typically indirectly though serialized objects). Heavyweight objects (textures, models, audio) are naturally stored in a binary format, which is optimized for the task at hand. The XML-based formats are essentially our game data's source files, and tends to function in a metadata-type capacity. As a simple example, our audio scripts store a lot of parameters about how to play a sound (pitch and volume variations, choosing among multiple variants, category and volume data, etc), and this metadata simply references external binary audio files, typically stored in a standard format like Ogg Vorbis or ADPCM compressed wave files. This metadata is compiled into a binary run-time version using a proprietary format designed to allow us to easily filter versions. These binary formats are then packed into larger containers for simpler management. Since I work on an MMO, we have to think about versioning our binary data, which tends to be challenging.
XML is a great format for us, being so widely supported, since we use both native parsing libraries as well as a lightweight custom parser for our C++ tools (or if we need to support in-game loading for the in-house version of the game). It's easy to look into a file format to see what might be going wrong using just a text editor, and with
I don't know what the argument about not knowing what every tag means, like in HTML. The entire point of XML is to be extensible, meaning that it's the client application that determines what the tags ultimately mean. And using SweetXML, btw, misses one of the great benefits of using XML, which is that's it's a standard for which you're likely never going to have to write parsing libraries. It's fine if you want to go that route, but just be aware that you may not have the choice of libraries that you would have by using standard XML.
XML does tend to suffer from the "golden hammer" syndrome. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of it's verbosity or general readability either, but if you take it for what it is, and use it sensibly, it's just another nifty tool you as a programmer can make good use of. After all, wouldn't you rather be working on more important parts of your project than fiddling with a text parser?