Re:The lost art of XML
by badgersnake on Friday January 23, 2026 @10:58AM
(#46734009)
There are a lot of good arguments against the XML ecosystem, but "I'm too lazy or dumb to understand it" is not one of them.
It is called DevUx and it is certainly a thing.
If the tooling sucks and the entire ecosystem is hard to understand, people won't adopt a technology.
XML was forced down everyone's throat for a decade! The second something else came along literally everyone who could jumped ship.
Interestingly, I've never heard the term 'DevUx' before. I suspect it's the same concept as Developer Experience, which I also find supremely important and historically underappreciated. Companies like JetBrains for example make a killing by being a company that really takes this aspect seriously.
On the other hand I've had a fellow developer laugh at me when trying to explain how this is important, so I'm unsure this is as important to others as it is to me.
Yeah devux is just short for developer experience.
The apple app store had an amazing initial devux, vs the blackberry app store which famously was a huge pain just to apply to and all the tooling was horrible.
Then if there were any problems in my XML, trying to decipher horrible errors determining what I did wrong.
The docs sucked and where "enterprise grade", the examples sucked (either too complicated or too simple), and the tooling sucked.
I suspect it would be fine now days with LLMs to help, but back when it existed, XML was a huge hassle.
I once worked on a robotics project where a full 50% of the CPU was used for XML serialization and parsing. Made it hard to actually have the robot do anything. XML is violently wordy and parsing strings is expensive.