This has been fun!
This list semi-regularly gets worked up over why more people don't use
XML for things we think they should use if for (e.g. why JSON not XML)?
This inevitably leads to a theme blaming development teams for not
thinking hard or long enough to make the "right" choice (i.e. XML).
But development teams aren't stupid: they think hard and pick the tools
they believe will make them and their business successful. And from that
(i.e. the only one that counts) perspective JSON has been a great choice.
To know why XML isn't picked, someone needs to talk with teams who
made/make these decisions, and find out why XML (and associated tools)
wasn't (and won't be) picked.
An XML list is not the best forum for obtaining that answer ;-}
Ian
On 26-Jun-18 10:53 AM, Nicholas Sushkin wrote:
> On Monday, June 25, 2018 11:35:35 AM EDT Michael Kay wrote:
>>> That fallacy is about to be exposed. JSON is "simpler" to use because up
>>> till now it has been used for simpler things.
>> JSON *is* simpler to use for simple things, no doubt about it. Mainly
>> because it is a much closer fit to the data models of conventional
>> programming languages.
> In JSON, each value is either a list of values or a set of key/value pairs.
> When the data model fits JSON, it's easy to use. It becomes hairy when values
> are html, xml, or json, because of escaping of double quotes. Most programming
> languages have matching data structures, so it's easy to use JSON to exchange
> them via an API. Also, JSON is fairly human readable, unless there is a lot of
> escaping.
>
> On the other hand, when your data are documents or when you don't mind writing
> a more complex (de)serialization code for your data structures to XML, XML
> provides better (de)serialization fidelity, more human readable than JSON,
> especially when values have few escaped angular brackets. Once you get over
> the hump of getting your data into XML, all the tooling that you can use for
> validation and transformation. That's the advantage of XML.
>
--
Ian Graham // <http://www.iangraham.org>
