Re:JSON as configuration files: please don’t (2016)
by afiori on Sunday April 14, 2019 @06:57AM
(#19658621)
I believe that more than being verbose (closing tags for example) it is that the whole spec is enormous, with entities and namespaces making it even more complex. Still we see that some of that is actually needed as various json path/schema projects show.
mapping a 1-1 s-expression translation on HTML/XML/JSON/YAML etc. solves nothing. YAML has (had) code execution security problem and parser incompatibility issues. HTML/XML actually need namespaces in a few cases. JSON is abused as "compile target".
There can be no one format that works for everything. This is why I like TOML, it is really good at what it tries to do and stops there.
The problem with XML itself is being unnecessarily verbose (and thus difficult for both human and machine to read) for what's just a way to encode trees. Attributes are arguably XML's self-inflicted gunshot wound in the foot; you mainly need them because of visual noise caused by regular nodes.