alt Hacker NewsWhile a great article, I actually found this linked post [0] to be even better, in which the author lays out how so much modern tooling for web dev exists simply because XML lost the browser war.
EDIT: obviously, JSON tooling sprang up because JSON became the lingua franca. I meant that it became necessary to address the shortcomings of JSON, which XML had solved.
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I read both, but I feel like they both miss what it was like to work with APIs back in the bad old XML days.
Yes, XML is more descriptive. It's also much harder for programmers to work with. Every client or server speaking an XML-based protocol had to have their own encoder/decoder that could map XML strings into in-memory data structures (dicts, objects, arrays, etc) that made sense in that language. These were often large and non-trivial to maintain. There were magic libraries in languages like Java and C# that let you map XML to objects using a million annotations, but they only supported a subset of XML and if your XML didn't fit that shoe you'd get 95% of the way and then realize that there was no way you'd get the last 5% in, and had to rewrite the whole thing with some awful streaming XML parser like SAX.
JSON, while not perfect, maps neatly onto data structures that nearly every language has: arrays, objects and dictionaries. That it why it got popular, and no other reason. Definitely not "fashion" or something as silly as that. Hundreds of thousands of developers had simply gotten extremely tired of spending 20% of their working lives producing and then parsing XML streams. It was terrible.
And don't even get me started on the endless meetings of people trying to design their XML schemas. Should this here thing be an attribute or a child element? Will we allow mixing different child elements in a list or will we add a level of indirection so the parser can be simpler? Everybody had a different idea about what was the most elegant and none of it mattered. JSON did for API design what Prettier did for the tabs vs spaces debate.
It’s the usual case of “I can’t be bothered to learn the complicated thing, give me something simple.” Two years later, “Oh wait, I need more features, this problem is more complicated than I thought”.
I'm not sure what the author means by "(XML) was abandoned because JavaScript won. The browser won."
The browser supported XML as much as Javascript. Remember that the "X" in "AJAX" acronym stands for XML, as well as "XMLHttpRequest" which was originally intended to be used for fetching data on the fly in XML. It was later repurposed to grab JSON data.
Javascript was not a reason XML was abandoned. It was just that the developer community did not like XML at all (after trying to use it for a while).
As for whether the dev community was "right", it's hard to comment because the article you linked is heavy on the ranting but light on the contextual details. For example it admits that simpler formats like JSON might be appropriate where "small data transfers between cooperating services and scenarios where schema validation would be overkill". So are they talking about people storing "documents" and "files" in JSON form? I guess it happens, but is it really as common to use JSON as opposed to other formats like YAML (which is definitely not caused by Javascript in the browser winning)?
Personally I think XML was abandoned because inherent bad design (and maybe over-engineering). A simpler format with schema checking is probably more ideal IMHO.