alt Hacker NewsXML was abandoned because we realized bandwidth costs money and while it was too late to do anything about how verbose HTML is, we didn't have to repeat the mistake with our data transfer protocols.
Even with zipped payloads, it's just way unnecessarily chatty without being more readable.
Replies
voidfunc • today at 4:34 AM
OK, but XML is a pretty solid format for a lot of other stuff that doesn't necessarily need network transmission.
howdyhowdyhowdy • today at 4:45 AM
if bandwidth was a concern, JSON was a poor solution. XML compresses nicely and efficiently. Yes it can be verbose to the human eyes, but I don't know if bandwidth is the reason it's not used more often.
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cosmotic • today at 4:40 AM
The article addresses this.
That doesn't match my memory, though its been a while now!
I remember the arguments largely revolving around verbosity and the prevalence of JSON use in browsers.
That doesn't mean bandwidth wasn't a consideration, but I mostly remember hearing devs complain about how verbose or difficult to work with XML was.