There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. “Oh, XML,” they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. “We use JSON now. Much cleaner.”

  • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    13 days ago

    IMHO one of the fundamental problems with XML for data serialization is illustrated in the article:

    (person (name "Alice") (age 30))
    [is serialized as]

    <person>
  <name>Alice</name>
  <age>30</age>
</person>

    Or with attributes:
    <person name="Alice" age="30" />

    The same data can be portrayed in two different ways. Whenever you serialize or deserialize data, you need to decide whether to read/write values from/to child nodes or attributes.

    That’s because XML is a markup language. It’s great for typing up documents, e.g. to describe a user interface. It was not designed for taking programmatic data and serializing that out.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      This is your confusion, not an issue with XML.

      Attributes tend to be “metadata”. You ever write HTML? It’s not confusing.

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        Having to make a decision isn’t my primary issue here (even though it can also be problematic, when you need to serialize domain-specific data for which you’re no expert). My issue is rather in that you have to write this decision down, so that it can be used for deserializing again. This just makes XML serialization code significantly more complex than JSON serialization code. Both in terms of the code becoming harder to understand, but also just lines of code needed.
        I’ve somewhat come to expect less than a handful lines of code for serializing an object from memory into a file. If you do that with XML, it will just slap everything into child nodes, which may be fine, but might also not be.

        • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          13 days ago

          Having to make a decision isn’t my primary issue here (even though it can also be problematic, when you need to serialize domain-specific data for which you’re no expert). My issue is rather in that you have to write this decision down, so that it can be used for deserializing again. This just makes XML serialization code significantly more complex than JSON serialization code. Both in terms of the code becoming harder to understand, but also just lines of code needed.

          This is, without a doubt, the stupidest argument against XML I’ve ever heard. Nobody has trouble with using attributes vs. tag bodies. Nobody. There are much more credible complaints to be made about parsing performance, memory overhead, extra size, complexity when using things like namespaces, etc.

          I’ve somewhat come to expect less than a handful lines of code for serializing an object from memory into a file. If you do that with XML, it will just slap everything into child nodes, which may be fine, but might also not be.

          No - it is fine to just use tag bodies. You don’t need to ever use attributes if you don’t want to. You’ve never actually used XML have you?

          https://www.baeldung.com/jackson-xml-serialization-and-deserialization