Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

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Look. I am just a web guy.

But why is XML so freaking great? We can’t even tell if whitespace is significant or not. If a schema says it’s insignificant then that’s that!

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/wang-whitespace-... That alone is TERRIBLE! (Same problem with YML.) Why should I bother with that? JSON can encode strings, hashes, arrays etc. in a way that’s instantly interoperable with JS and is far far more unambiguous.

What exactly is so great about XML that you can’t do with JSON in a better way? Schemas can be stored in JSON. XPATH can specified for JSON. Seriously I never got the appeal of XML except that it was first.

Some of XML's biggest achievements lie in written documentation formats(DocBook, DITA) where fine-grained markup control is needed and the presentation of the content is secondary to semantic features like footnotes, indexing, etc. These are formats that professional technical writers turn to when Markdown, Word docs or PDF won't quite do the trick.

For a lot of data, XML isn't the right form and buries too much data in hierarchy and tag soups - but it's flexible enough to make it into whatever you want, and since XML was buzzworded and XML libs were some of the easiest things to reach for in the 90's, it got pushed into every role imaginable.

Two specific things about JSON: elements with the same name overwrite each other; and even though parsers are generally good about it, items are not required to be returned in the order they appear in the file.

Oh and there's no comments.

One thing that bugs me about JSON is that it can't easily [0] represent general graph-structured data because its notion of identity is too limited. XML can represent general graphs trivially.

[0] https://realprogrammer.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/json-graph-s...

XML wasn't meant as replacement for JSON, but for HTML without vocabulary-specific parsing rules (eg. SGML DTDs).

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