Thanks for the mention! We continue to invest in Hyperview to solve many of the problems presented in the article.

One big difference: instead of JSON, we use XML to represent the UI. XML is a hypermedia format with built-in extensibility, which makes it a good fit for server-driven UIs. We wrote about this decision here: https://engineering.instawork.com/when-xml-beats-json-ui-lay...

Thank you adam for your sane decision to use XML instead of JSON as hypermedia format.

there are still people bitching about things that don't matter like this? They have the same semantics and choosing between them is arbitrary. Json can be enforced with a schema but I doubt this is your concern.

They do not have the same semantics.

JSON has a data model based on the lowest-common-denominator data structures available in programming languages, i.e. lists and dictionaries.

HTML/XML has a radically different data model that's based on documents that are filled with content with intermixed markup/metadata.

As a result, representing pure data is awkward in XML but straightforward in JSON, and likewise representing a document of mixed content is very very awkward in JSON but quite straightforward (and easily extensible) when represented as XML.

It's one of those "use the right tool for the job at hand" kind of things.

there is only one difference which is that the so called markup has a special syntax for "children". It's just some arbitrary design decision hardly a technical merit. As a transport they are both crappy as they are text based, why don't you complain about the fact that we waste a significant chunk of the Internet's traffic with these garbage, untyped transports.

Hahaha. Worked at a startup that made something damn similar around 2010 (XML documents describing apps, which our core code drew as native UI). The docs for Hyperview are downright nostalgic. :-)

I remember late 90s early 2000s getting something like that working on pocket pc, though with a pocket access cdb providing the layout