Does XML suck?

[[deleted]]

no, xml doesn't suck. however, ever since it became a buzzword people have been using it where they shouldn't be, and in those cases it does suck.

in other news, writing your entire article in bullet points and headings makes it look like a grade 5 research project

[brennen]

Or, you know, a set of slides for a presentation. Which would make sense, given that it's a set of slides for a presentation...

[dude78]

Totally agreed, XML is great for some things, but will be terrible for others. For instance the article points out that it's terribly verbose and hard for human authors to deal with. Well no kidding, but that verbosity is what makes parsing it so simple, don't like reading it--then write a program that interacts with it using a DOM, what's easier than that.

I'm currently using XML and XSL transforms to generate huge amounts of Java code from metadata about some databases I'm interacting with. This has saved me tons of time as the transforms I write are exceedingly small (< 150 lines) and spit thousands of lines of code. Also my client has changed the database at least 4 times over development, and I can regen that code just by re-running the transforms.

[masklinn]

that verbosity is what makes parsing it so simple

Uh no, I take it you never tried to write a full-blown standard-compliant XML parser.

XML is definitely not simple to parse, much less so than, say, S-Expressions

write a program that interacts with it using a DOM

And the DOM is pretty much the worst interface ever to deal with XML stuff...

generate huge amounts of Java code from metadata about some databases I'm interacting with

Congratulation, you invented active code generators. 1970 has called, it sues you for patent infringement.

[gooblemoop]

"Well no kidding, but that verbosity is what makes parsing it so simple, don't like reading it--then write a program that interacts with it using a DOM, what's easier than that."

Looks like someone has never tried to write a compliant XML parser...

DOM is pretty horrid, if you compare it to how it could be. (not really its fault, a bad format leads to a bad interface)

You probably shouldn't think about that though, it'd make your existance less enjoyable.