XML was vastly overused for a long time. That doesn't make those usages correct, as there were alternatives even then. (It also doesn't make people who overused somehow bad; I think it was a reasonable and necessary mistake.) It certainly doesn't make new ones correct now given that JSON's been around 16+ years. [1]
I think the author here is slightly strong in his criticism; I think XML is great for things that are meant to be long-lived and self-documenting. That is, things that are used like documents. But if I'm passing short-lived globs of structured data back and forth, as with an API, I think JSON's a much better fit, as is Protobufs for more tightly joined code.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030228034147/http://www.crockf...
Not really. Plenty of things suck at their original intended purpose and remain in use because they are very good for some other purpose. (Viagra is an example well-known to popular culture, but hardly unique.)
> XML was vastly overused for a long time. That doesn't make those usages correct, as there were alternatives even then.
XML is perhaps not abstractly ideal for many of the purpose it has been used for, but in many cases it was superior to other alternatives for practical reasons, particularly the tooling ecosystem. (JSON is the new XML, and virtually the same thing can be said for JSON in many of its current uses, though it does clean up XMLs two biggest warts, element/attribute distinction and verbosity—though even for human readable formats YAML does the latter even more than JSON while being easier to read, not to mention all the binary options when readability isn't a concern.)
Compare that to JSON or TOML, which are more human-friendly and waste fewer bytes on structure to convey the same information. When used for data storage, two XML files of the same schema describing two completely different objects are likely to share a large amount of content, which is wasteful and gets in the way.
And then there is the EU-wide absurdity of WhateverAdES, which invariably leads to onion-like layers of XML in ASN.1 encoded as base64 in XML wrapped in CMS DER encoded message...
There are many better reasons to hate XML.
I use csv when applicable. I use protobufs when applicable. But for the typical use case I choose xml for it's some config/dsl/dataset that needs to be human-editable (support comments, for example), more complex structure than csv supports, and preferably not need an external library or a custom parser. Json, Csv, Toml, S-Expressions, protobufs all fail one of more of these requirements. I'm sure there are others but none that don't have at least one drawback I don't want.
A poor man's data storage is exactly what I want!.
And XML doesn't? Quite a few (not all, but quite a few nonetheless) programming languages include zero support for reading or writing XML-formatted data without using an external library or custom parser. This includes nearly all languages that predate XML, and quite a few languages that postdate it. Even when a language does have built-in (or at least in the standard library) support for XML, it's almost always a royal pain to use, especially once namespaces and schemas are involved.
Once upon a time, though, the answer was (and in a lot of places still is) INI:
- It's human-editable and supports comments
- It supports more complex structure than CSV
- Some languages have built-in support for it, and the Windows and GLib APIs support it, too (well, something similar enough to be compatible, in the latter case)
INI falls flat when you need to express deeper levels of nesting than keys and sections, though.
There's also YAML, which meets all your criteria about as well as XML does (at least on average; your specific language/platform might favor one or the other).
On a platform that has almost no support out of the box (e.g python) the choice is open. But on a platform that has a couple of formats built in, picking a format outside that platform is a pretty big step. The return needs to be substantial for a .net developer to use yaml via an external library over xml.
My reasoning in this thread has always started from the perspective that xml comes built in and almost no other format does. This is the case for e.g java and .net but not for python or C for example. But the prevalence of xml comes from java/.net so if we are to ask why, then we should consider that.
Omg YAML. Here's an example for you.
- external:
metric:
name: kafka_consumer_group_lag
selector:
matchLabels:
topic: rtb_trx_records
consumer_group: trx-record-validator
target:
type: Value
value: 30000
type: External
And, being honest, JSON schema is better than, say, GPB or Avro schema at enforcing field relationships, e.g., "if typeId is 7, then partnerId cannot be null"
The fact that MobileDoc exists makes me physically ill. Something that can be expressed with one line containing a paragraph element and an italic tag is over a dozen lines of JSON spam.
XML is a complete mess. Have you SEEN it's spec?
You can put JSONs spec in a single page. XMLs spec, not so much. Hell, most of the XML parsers don't support the spec, and the ones which do, historically have been riddled with security holes.
JSON over XML was simplicity over a crazy spec built by a bunch of companies all wanting to shove their own crazyness into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#Data_portability_issues
XML has XSD and RELAX NG for more than 15 years now. https://json-schema.org/ is still a draft.
It’s not as simple as saying “everywhere xml is used, json would be a better choice”.
Yes, storage is cheap. Bandwidth is not. Also, you really don't want a human that intercepts your data to be able to read it. Additionally, your data structue only makes sense in the context of your domain, which usually has been modeled in your program(s) that work in that domain, and thus it will be better if you deserialize it within tools that understand that domain.
If you feel the need for a general purpose deserialization protocol, there are several available - Avro/Protobuf, etc.
Binary encoded data can often be decoded without consuming the entire document. Sax-paparser-like reading requires at least reading an open and a close before the data is useful.
String serialization is a wasteful endeavor. It makes life easy for devs because it takes one less step to read the data in a text editor or log message, but quite often requires hacks to model things like recursive or self-referential data structures, and wastes space by repeating property names constantly for every item within the serialized structure. It's predicated on four of the fallacies of distributed computing, namely - bandwidth is infinite, the network is secure, transport cost is zero, and latency is zero. It is a solution looking for a problem, and because we are lazy, we don't build tools that would make binary serialized formats just as easy to use as json/yaml/xml.
<invoice id="123" customer-id="456" date="20199-10-30">
<item no="1" product-id="789" qty="42" />
</invoice>
1. Each element has explicit type name (invoice, item). JSON is "typeless", which simply means the type information travels out of band. And with XML namespaces these type names can be made globally unique, but still stay human readable.
2. Each element is self-contained, the code that produces the <item> doesn't need to know if there was an item before or after it so that it should add a separator. (The dangling comma problem in JSON.)
3. The attribute names are not just arbitrary strings as in JSON, there are strict rules of what can be in the name. They're much more suited for structured data than JSON, where you can name an attribute "foo.bar" and some JSON readers that accept a JSON "path" won't be able to find it.
4. It has less visual noise than JSON because the attributes don't have quotes around them and you don't need to separate elements with a special symbol. Despite the common belief well-written XML is more readable than JSON.
And we haven't event touched things like validation + extended types, references, and transformation of data.
Make an xml stylesheet and your kubernetes cluster is instantly documented.
Having to use a gazillion declarative languages to achieve what a regular programming language does is simply crazy.
It’s testable, discoverable etc.
(Sorry about shameless plug, I’m not affiliated)
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/nxml-mod...
I am writing non-XML code most of the day, and I do not have structured editing / auto braces enabled. So when I need to edit that one XML config, I'll open it in my regular editor, which will provide at most syntax highlight, and edit it as needed with a bit of swearing. And next time, I would promise myself I'd choose a different config format which does not need special editors.
That sounds like a very passive-aggressive way to deal with a problem. Do you do the same thing when writing programs?
In general, when you see something inefficient, you can either fix it to make it better, or ignore and come up with random workarounds.
In my opinion, a config file which cannot be edited by hand, and which needs a special editor with non-trivial learning curve, is a inefficiency. I can either ignore it, and set up the specialized tools; or I can fix it, by ripping out XML and replacing it with something more human-editable, like TOML or YAML. In large teams, it is almost always better to fix it -- sure, I will spend a few hours getting rid of XML, but this will pay itself off in the long term, as no one else will have to bother with special setup anymore.
(This obvious only applies to the systems where XML is a minor part, like a single configuration file. If your system has huge amount of XML, you better learn the right tools)
I myself don't even use syntax highlighting and normally work in vim and although I do make errors in XML sometimes, I find that I make at least as many syntactic errors in Python or C code that I have to weed out before I can proceed. But I never heard anyone complaining about Python or C being too strict :)
Not even formats designed for human consumption such as yaml are very good. The good ones for editing (toml, csv, ini) fall short when it comes to complex structure instead. There is no silver bullet.
That’s easy: S-expressions. Steve Yegge wrote about this in 2005: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem
Would you rather have:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE log SYSTEM "logger.dtd">
<log>
<record>
<date>2005-02-21T18:57:39</date>
<millis>1109041059800</millis>
<sequence>1</sequence>
<logger></logger>
<level>SEVERE</level>
<class>java.util.logging.LogManager$RootLogger</class>
<method>log</method>
<thread>10</thread>
<message>A very very bad thing has happened!</message>
<exception>
<message>java.lang.Exception</message>
<frame>
<class>logtest</class>
<method>main</method>
<line>30</line>
</frame>
</exception>
</record>
</log>
(log
'(record
(date "2005-02-21T18:57:39")
(millis 1109041059800)
(sequence 1)
(logger nil)
(level 'SEVERE)
(class "java.util.logging.LogManager$RootLogger")
(method 'log)
(thread 10)
(message "A very very bad thing has happened!")
(exception
(message "java.lang.Exception")
(frame
(class "logtest")
(method 'main)
(line 30)))))Although tbh I'm preferring the XML in your example due to the lack of random quotes - why does (record need a quote, but (log doesn't?
The XML seems a lot more consistent.
<log>
<record date="2005-02-21T18:57:39" millis="1109041059800" sequence="1" level="SEVERE" class="java.util.logging.LogManager$RootLogger" method="log" thread="10" message="A very very bad thing has happened!">
<exception id="123" message="java.lang.Exception" class="logtest" method="main" line="30" />
</record>
</log>
<record date="2005-02-21T18:57:39" millis="1109041059800" sequence="1" level="SEVERE" class="java.util.logging.LogManager$RootLogger" method="log" thread="10" message="A very very bad thing has happened!" exc-message="java.lang.Exception" exc-class="logtest" exc-method="main" exc-line="30" />
<exception id="123" message="java.lang.Exception" class="logtest" method="main" line="30" />
<record ... exception-id="123" />Then again: I’d usually only ever choose between formats with support already on the platform/standard library, if it was just some config or small data file. If the data is core to the product then of course it might be reasonable to include a new library or even write a parser. I’m talking java and .net now mainly.
Lisp?
The advantage XML would have in that situation is that, because it's so verbose, if you get a malformed XML, you can eyeball-parse it and often figure out how to hand-edit it to make it valid. If it is valid, you can also see exactly how the schema you were sent differs from the schema you expected. An S-expression, having less redundancy, also is potentially more brittle.
It's a selling point while you're trying to figure out how to get it working. Once you have it working, it's not - but by then, you have it working, so why change it?
> ASN.1 is a joint standard of the International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and ISO/IEC, originally defined in 1984...
Today, of course, we treat the entirety of our deployed infrastructure as 'merely' a platform to write code. And not only are experimentation and failure OK, they're positively encouraged. Velocity became important.
Then, once you deserialize it, it's still a printable version of ASN.1. Sure, it's unambiguous, rigidly defined, and standardized. It's still gouge-your-eyeballs-out horrible to try to do anything with.
Say you get an XML message over the wire with a bit flipped. If you look at it, you have a good chance to be able to figure out what went wrong, edit one character, and you can now process it. If you get an ASN.1 message in the same condition, it's pretty much game over (though there may be special tools that could save you).
Say you get an XML, and you don't know the schema. You look at it, and you can see what's going on. You get an ASN.1 where you don't know the schema, and you can be totally sunk. (If I recall correctly, in ASN.1, you can have schemas that are private, that is, not specified in the standard.)
((foo . (bar . baz)) (foo . (bar . baz)) (foo . (bar . baz)) (foo . (bar . baz)))
And say "index all the foos", but you're mixing the structure and the content, in a way that JSON and XML explicitly separate.
Let's not forget, many one of these configuration files and data formats are one-off hacks that were meant to be replaced by a real format, a real parser, a real DSL etc. The reason the xml config/dsl/format stuck is because it worked. And it was cheap and easy.
It may not be the popular answer, but it’s definitely a valid answer.
Whether that was the intended purpose when xml was designed is irrelevant. It’s what xml is used for in almost every case.
The author also doesn’t suggest what should be used instead to encode structured data, or perhaps more importantly what should have been used to encode graph like things such as map/lists/objects in the 2000’s. Json really hasn’t been an alternative until quite recently (10 years ago?).
In fact reading the article carefully I fail to see the author argue why xml shouldn’t be used as a data format either.