There was a discussion in another thread lately about various ways of representing XML. It got me thinking, and I wanted to ask about people's practical experience.
What projects have y'all done where XML was the best choice for a reason other than "because we needed to interoperate with a service that required XML"? I've never needed to use XML that much -- HTML and CSS for the browser, JSON for the wire, SQLite or Postgres for the DB, and (on one rather memorable occasion) Postscript for the printer. I'm aware of the various technologies around XML -- XPATH, XSLT, etc -- but they haven't featured in any project I've ever needed to do, so I haven't spent much time on them. Is that that's something I should find time for? I'm aware of two primary features that XML proponents point to for why XML is worth knowing: It's self-describing and it's typed. To me, the first sounds like a security nightmare of sophistry. (Real-world applications are typically going to know the format of the data that they're consuming, and you certainly do not want to let external data specify what standards and formats it should be held to.) The ability to type data (e.g. specify that 'age' elements are measured in days, or years, or etc) is a good feature, and I'll give XML that one. On the other hand, XML is extremely heavyweight, thereby slowing parsing and transmission as well as making the data less human-readable. Are there angles here that I haven't encountered or thought about yet? If so, what would you recommend I read up on / look into? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
