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by DemocracyFTW2 1298 days ago
Funny.

Among other things, XML is self describing. Yeah sure. We all know how that turned out. That was the day when everybody was crazy about the Semantic Web, and for some reason XML / some convoluted format built on XML was viewed by many as "semantic", apparently because of the many intractable URLs the format called for. Y'know, URLs, or was it URIs or URNs, those little pieces of text that, even when they point to nothing in particular, somehow have the power to bring "semantics" to the data.
3 comments
qsort 1298 days ago
If you replace XML with JSON and PDAs with phone apps he's spot on.

"Truly powerful applications can be built using combinations of JavaScript and XML"

"XML can be used to mediate between Database row-based output, asynchronous message records, and other types of business forms and data."

"Business-based TXP systems of the future will need to incorporate XML as part of their backbone services technology. The ability to read and understand an XML description of an incoming record or object, and the ability to easily generate XML to describe an outbound record or object, will be a major requirement for system-to-system, business-to-business transaction processing. Intelligent browsers will have XML built in, allowing XML to be used bi-directionally all the way up and down the business hierarchy: from PDAs to PCs to Web/App Servers to Transaction processors."

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coldtea 1298 days ago
The difference being that JSON doesn't have the pretentiousness, mental, tooling and processing overhead, and the marketing-imposed-solution-of-a-non-problem XML was sold as...
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qsort 1298 days ago
Oh absolutely. XML and HTML are the epitome of trying to solve a problem that's not very hard, and not solving it very well.

S-expressions reinvented badly.

JSON does have the same problem at its core, but at least it's simple and the data structures it offers (dicts and lists) are semi-reasonable primitives.

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agumonkey 1298 days ago
XML was just a few steps in the wrong direction and it diverted all users energy nowhere.

When I see sexp as serialization format I miss very few, same for json.. but xml wasn't that different. Just too much noise (ns,attributes) and just not enough genericity (no generic list or map) made it useless. Surprising.

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jayd16 1298 days ago
Turns out every language has lists and unordered maps. That's pretty much all you need.

When you start expecting ordered maps or add arbitrary attributes to container types things becomes exotic very quickly.

Reference could might be ok (some json APIs make it work) but it complicates the parsing.

And that doesn't even get into the hell of xml that actually executes code.

Not surprising to me that a smaller standard won out.

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zozbot234 1298 days ago
The Semantic Web is not dependent on XML in any way. You can use JSON-LD.
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