logoalt Hacker News

froh • today at 4:59 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

that's underselling xml. xml is explicitly meant for data serialization and exchange, xsd reflects that, and it's the reason for jaxb Java xml binding tooling.

get me right: Json is superior in many aspects, xml is utterly overengineered.

but xml absolutely was _meant_ for data exchange, machine to machine.

Replies

mkozlows • today at 5:09 AM

No. That use case was grafted onto it later. You can look at the original 1998 XML 1.0 spec first edition to see what people were saying at the time: https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210#sec-origin-goals

Here's the bullet point from that verbatim:

  The design goals for XML are:

    XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
    XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
    XML shall be compatible with SGML.
    It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
    The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
    XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
    The XML design should be prepared quickly.
    The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
    XML documents shall be easy to create.
    Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
Or heck, even more concisely from the abstract: "The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML."

It's always talking about documents. It was a way to serve up marked-up documents that didn't depend on using the specific HTML tag vocabulary. Everything else happened to it later, and was a bad idea.

mkozlows • today at 5:11 AM

And as for JAXB, it was released in 2003, well into XML's decadent period. The original Java APIs for XML parsing were SAX and DOM, both of which are tag and document oriented.