On Thursday, 29 August 2013 at 15:43:36 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
While I do agree that in the current state of affairs, XML
support is a
must, I also think that XML is just way overengineered, IMNSHO.
It has
adds too much overhead and therefore requires compression to be
efficient, and it is needlessly complex for what it does (tag
attributes, all the different cases of CDATA / non-CDATA,
etc.). This
complexity makes it impractical to edit by hand, relegating it
to
machine reading/writing only, which then begs the question of
why a
binary format wasn't chosen instead. And don't get me started
on DTDs,
which are incredibly convoluted and can't even express certain
things
that one might want to express in an automatic validation
system. Or
that 17-headed monster called XSLT, which, thankfully, is
fading into
the obscurity of time.
JSON is a nicer, simpler alternative, though there may be
limitations
with it that I don't know about. Word on the street is that
many people
are abandoning XML for JSON due to lower maintenance overhead
(and this
includes one of my friends, who was a hardcore XML fanatic -- I
was
frankly quite surprised when he told me he was considering
migrating to
JSON, since the original reason he chose XML was so that his
data will
future-proof... well, so much for *that*).
But all of this is irrelevant... it doesn't alleviate the need
for a
std.xml replacement, since we have to live in the real world
where XML
exists and must be supported. :)
T
I am moving away from XML too. Wanted to use it for a private
project. But I soon realized the madness of it, especially when
there are people involved who are not programmers and have no
clue whatsoever about markup languages, data storage formats etc.
I think JSON and YAML are good candidates for the private project
which revolves around collecting words and phrases and archiving
them. I don't know exactly what I will use, but XML definitely
won't get the job.
DTD sounds too much like DDT!
