The thing is, it was never really intended as a storage format for plain data. It’s a markup language, so you’re supposed to use it for describing complex documents, like it’s used in HTML for example. It was just readily available as a library in many programming languages when not much else was, so it got abused for data storage a lot.

Just a while ago, I read somewhere: XML is like violence. If it doesn’t solve your problem, maybe you are not using it enough.

There are people who find XML hard to read?

Disagree. I prefer XML for config files where the efficiency of disk size doesn’t matter at all. Layers of XML are much easier to read than layers of Json. Json is generally better where efficiency matters.

Wishful thinking

This is what happens when stack overflow is used for training.

That’s my biggest peev about JSON actually. No comments!! WTH!

{ "key": "six",
  "value": 6,
  "comment": "6 is a bad number. Use five." }

And there are some truly magic tools.

XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

People may hate on SOAP but I’ve never had issues with setting up a SOAP client

I came into the industry right when XML fever had peaked as was beginning to fall back. But in MS land, it never really went away, just being slowly cannibalize by JSON.

You’re right though, there was some cool stuff being done with xml when it was assumed that it would be the future of all data formats. Being able to apply standard tools like XLT transforms, XSS styling, schemas to validate, and XPath to search/query and you had some very powerful generic tools.

JSON has barely caught up to that with schemes and transforms. JQ lets you query json but I don’t really find it more readable or usable than XPath. I’m sure something like XLT exists, but there’s no standardization or attempt to rally around shared tools like with XML.

That to me is the saddest thing. VC/MBA-backed companies have driven everyone into the worst cases of NIHS ever. Now there’s no standards, no attempts to share work or unify around reliable technology. Its every company for themselves and getting other people suckered into using (and freely maintaining) your tools as a prelude to locking them into your ecosystem is the norm now.

Except for obvious typos

XML is fine. Namespaces have a special place in hell though

zipped xml!

If you are writing it then you are doing it wrong.

What about writing in xml without any passion ?

Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

I’m sorry which LLM is this?

It’s perplexity.ai. I like it because it doesn’t require an account and because it can search the internet. It’s like microsoft’s bing but slightly less cringe.

How’d you get that out of it?

The screenshot is fake. I used Inspect Element.

The answer is not real. The tool, on the other hand, is called Perplexity. It “understands” your question, searches the web, and gives you a summary, citing all the relevant sources.

Too redundant, just use S-exprs.

(Mostly joking, but in some cases…)

coral by cohere

no wait, it’s perplexity, I remember the logo.
you can try their labs version which gives to access to latest and beefy models like llama3.1 70b