| Sounds great in theory. In practice it doesn't seem nearly as carefully implemented, and/or XML is used where it's actually not needed. XML is designed to be a markup language. The fact that it has all of these other things bolted on doesn't actually make it a good generic data interchange format. For things like RDF, maybe it's the best option we have, but that's not because XML is great, it's because XML was used in the only standardized option. Looking at an example of xml:lang: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<doc xml:lang="en">
<list title="Titre en français" xml:lang="fr">
<p>Texte en français.</p>
<p xml:lang="fr-ca">Texte en québécquois.</p>
<p xml:lang="en">Second text in English.</p>
</list>
<p>Text in English.</p>
</doc>
...this is a nightmare. If I want to translate a document, the last thing I want to do is embed each translation inline like that. Almost certainly the best response is to "fork" the document at the highest level and include separate language versions of the document; otherwise, if you have 20 translations of the document, you need 20x the text in the document than any one reader will need.Yes, XML gives you that particular hammer. But using XML results in a lot of sore thumbs. Schema validation is nice to be sure. I'm using JSON Schema Validation myself [1] to verify incoming JSON, and I'm automatically generating those schemas from the TypeScript data structure specifications [2]. This is particularly good for a JavaScript language target, of course, but I find XML and XPath to be ugly or painfully slow in every language I've used it from, while JSON just has a better impedance match to data storage and interchange. [1] http://json-schema.org/ [2] https://github.com/YousefED/typescript-json-schema |