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fc417fc802yesterday at 10:00 PM3 repliesview on HN

It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done? I don't think anyone who considers it obsolete has an informed opinion on the matter.

Typically a more primitive (sorry, minimal) format such as JSON is sufficient in which case there's no excuse to overcomplicate things. But sometimes JSON isn't sufficient and people start inventing half baked solutions such as JSON-LD for what is already a solved problem with a mature tech stack.

XSLT remains an elegant and underused solution. Guile even includes built in XML facilities named SXML.


Replies

coldteayesterday at 11:12 PM

>It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done?

People who wanted to "get shit done" had much better alternatives. XML grew out of hype, corporate management forcing it, and bundling to all kinds of third party products and formats just so they can tick the "have this hot new format support" box.

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thaynetoday at 4:11 AM

> It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done?

But it used to be. And so it was used for a lot of things where it wasn't a great fit. XML works fairly well as a markup format, but for a lot of things, something like json models the data better.

> which case there's no excuse to overcomplicate things.

And that's a problem with xml. It's too complicated. Even if the basic model of xml is a good fit for your data, most of the time you don't need to worry about namespaces and entity definitions, and DTDs, but those are still part of most implementations and can expose more attack surface for vulnerabilities (especially entity definitions). And the APIs of libraries are generally fairly complicated.

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mycallyesterday at 10:46 PM

It makes me wonder how well an LLM like Opus can generate XSLT which was always the hard part when writing by hand.

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