XML is better than YAML

Re:XML is better than YAML by krab on Thursday September 21, 2023 @03:53AM (#37594499)

I think the verbosity is not a problem. For example if you compare

    ["string1", "string2"]

    <list>
        <e>string1</e>
        <e>string2</e>
    </list>

then each element has about four bytes overhead (<e> instead of " and </e> instead of ",) plus some overhead for the list itself that may be offset by putting the name of the list itself into the element.

However, the issue is that you have to write a custom parser. There is no direct mapping between your data structure and the XML file. This developer ergonomics is a big win for JSON and consequently YAML.

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Re:XML is better than YAML by chii on Thursday September 21, 2023 @04:00AM (#37594551)

> There is no direct mapping between your data structure and the XML file.

i think that's by design tbh.

it's only a big win for JSON (and YAML) because the default case works OK - but every time someone has a problem parsing numbers in JSON (because the value is bigger than Integer.MAX in the host language), this is the cause.

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Re:XML is better than YAML by krab on Thursday September 21, 2023 @04:09AM (#37594630)

Yes, I understand that (and I like XML as a format and XSLT 2.0 as a language). However, from the popularity of JSON, it seems that for most cases it's the easier choice.

Take any random REST API for example. If it returns JSON, you can integrate it more easily than if it returned XML. If you need special cases like large numbers (or date-times), you handle only those.

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Re:XML is better than YAML by taeric on Thursday September 21, 2023 @10:39AM (#37598310)

I'm confused? Integrating XML was fairly easy back in the day. If in a dynamic language, serialize into a DOM and then use xpath to get data out. If in a static language, parse into your objects.

With JSON, you can mostly do the same. Such that I don't necessarily see this as a huge advantage of XML, mind. Having a schema does have some advantages, though.

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Re:XML is better than YAML by GoblinSlayer on Thursday September 21, 2023 @10:37AM (#37598287)

JSON maps only to javascript, but only because it was designed as a subset of javascript, for others you have to use DOM or serializers, then there's no difference between formats. For this matter, xml has generic serializers than can be used instead of writing custom one every time.

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