[patrickg]

apples and oranges? There is no other way of encoding structured documents these days than XML. Like it or not, XML is the de facto standard for data exchange (export from databases, product information software,....)

XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.

[dragonwriter]

> XML might be overengeneered (which, except for a few things I don't agree with), but there is currently no alternative for it.

There's perhaps no general alternative to it that covers all of the things XML tries to do; there are lots of specific alternatives that cover specific things that XML tries to do. The complaint against XML isn't that there is a better general replacement so much that there is a better replacement for each (or at least, very many) of the applications and that trying to shoehorn all of them into a single solution has costs that outweigh the benefits.

[boomlinde]

The site in question lists several alternatives, some of which are widely in use especially in cases where XML falls short: brevity, fast to parse, easily readable... Most of all, calling it the de facto standard is either dishonest or clueless.

[patrickg]

I am working for many years in the publishing business (dealing with structured documents, product data etc.). I can tell you, that all of my customers are more open XML than any other document formats (there exist none as suitable for the job).

You can call me clueless or dishonest, I don't care. I can only share my experience with the topic. You don't have to believe me.

[boomlinde]

Your customers in the field you work in, perhaps, but it's hard to tell that's what you mean when you write data exchange. It's a wide field that is not limited to the publishing business or your customers.

[ilitirit]

> Most of all, calling it the de facto standard is either dishonest or clueless

It is in fact the de facto standard in the publishing industry. The "other" format is of course PDF.

Maybe all of this will change when we have more technologies that support formats that can handle mixed content as easily as XML.

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

Does anyone use Microsoft XPS? It looked rather interesting; like PDF without any interactivity (except for links) and with special support for publishing (color management, job tickets, etc.). And internally it is a collection of XML docs and binary data zipped together into a single file; pretty neat, must be easier to use in automated workflows.

[patrickg]

I can't answer the question but anyway:

None of my customers have ever asked for that. I have not seen a printing house that demands XPS. So I doubt that it plays any role in the market (Germany here).

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

Thanks, that's informative. I haven't seen it used much either; the only real use I saw (aside from viewing) was an XPS printer driver for a Canon inkjet printer. (I've also heard that it produced better results than the standard driver, but have no first-hand experience.)

[justincormack]

databases are not structured documents, you can export them eg in JSON perfectly well. Or for that matter in SQL as is the usual practise. Marked up structured text is a different matter, XML still has a use case there.

[patrickg]

I was a bit unclear. When I get database dumps, I get them as Excel files or as an XML document.

Most of the times the documents I get are hierarchically structured.

Yes, JSON could be fine as well. But it simply lacks a standard toolchain which XSLT ans its ilk proides.

I am not trying to defend XML in any way. I just want to say the two things:

a) my customers never deal with JSON, but often with XML, so JSON (and other formats) are not an issue for me b) There is a very nice toolchain for XML, including formatters, tranformation tools, database publishing tools (my very own: https://speedata.github.io/publisher/index.html) and many others. I have not found such a toolchain for other formats.

[justincormack]

But XML does not map well to a database dump. A database is a set of sets of tuples. It is not generically hierarchical. It maps to a set of csv files say, as a transfer medium, but it is designed to be manipulated through relational calculus, which is not easily mapped to xslt.

You are using tools not because they map well to the problem space, but because they are the tools you have, which your customers want, and which you are familiar with, but that does not mean they are actually mapping well to the domain.

[patrickg]

Actually the XML part is the one that maps best to the problem space. I deal with structured documents (such as part/title/paragraph ... or product group/product/components). The database part (usually Excel sheets or SQL based stores) are the ones that are "insufficient".