The sad thing about #5 is that XPath is epic and trying to simulate queries using it in almost any programming language without just implementing it is tons of grunt work :(. When I a trying to parse through some complex data structure I still to this day find myself getting tired after writing a bunch of nested for loops resulting in my saying "screw this", convering the data to XML, and making short work of the problem with XPath (which only got better and better in subsequent releases of XSL/T).
Re:What the f*** is the edge?
by batty_alex on Sunday August 12, 2018 @08:06AM
(#17744000)
You forgot my favorite one:
6. Too easy to accidentally reinvent Lisp via xml.
I thought it was funny the first time I ran into an instance of it happening, which quickly turned into horror. Not only was the logic split, but it meant mentally parsing this:
<If><RegEx string="{AZ*}"><Register /></RegEx></If>
Re:What the f*** is the edge?
by beaconstudios on Monday August 13, 2018 @08:40AM
(#17749584)
not that JSON is immune to this - mongodb's query interface is a reinvention of the same, but in JSON.
1. You could represent it as a nested structure of your language's standard lists & maps, which you already know the API of, which you could directly operate on. For dynamic languages, this is much faster to stick a prototype together, even if it bites you in the ass eventually. But by the stage, you've already chosen JSON.
2. It was less characters to manually type.
3. Particular uses of XML were extremely verbose. The S in SOAP stood for Simple, which looks ironic in retrospect.
4. In a time when payloads didn't routinely use compression, the closing tags could be a noticeable increase in size.
5. The vast majority of communication that now uses JSON didn't benefit significantly from XPath (people prefer to navigate data structures using their language features, not a generic API), namespaces, DTDs, XML Schema etc.
In about that order.
You could argue that much of this is superficial, and it is, but the industry has shown time and again that lowering the barrier to entry, even in ways that make little difference in the long run, usually wins out.