I hate writing and reading xml compared to json, I don’t really care if one is slightly leaner than the other. If your concern is the size or speed you should probably be rethinking how you serialize the data anyway (orotobuff/DB)
Don’t drink the JSON coolaid. XML is fine. Better, in many cases, because XML files actually support comments.
In the modern programming world, XML is just JSON before JSON was cool. There was a whole hype about XML for a few years, which is why old programming tools are full of XML.
It’s funny but sad to see the JSON ecosystem scramble to invent all of the features that XML already had. Even ActivityPub runs on “external entities but stored as general purpose strings”, and don’t get me started on the incompatible, incomplete standards for describing a JSON schema.
It’s not just XML either, now there’s cap’n proto and protobuf and bson which are all just ASN.1 but “cool”.
<span style="color:#323232;">{ "key": "six",
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "value": 6,
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "comment": "6 is a bad number. Use five." }
</span>
IMHO: XML is a file format, JSON is a data transfer format. Reinventing things like RSS or SVG to use JSON wouldn’t be helpful, but using XML to communicate between your app’s frontend and backend wouldn’t be either.
It’s perplexity.ai. I like it because it doesn’t require an account and because it can search the internet. It’s like microsoft’s bing but slightly less cringe.
It’s a proxy for a number of LLMs of choice, prompts anonymised before they’re sent. A bit like how their search engine is anonymised Bing, or how their maps are anonymised Apple Maps. I’m happy with the service!
It’s not a waste of time… it’s a waste of space. But it does allow you to “enforce” some schema. Which, very few people use that way and so, as a data store using JSON works better.
Or… we could go back to old school records where you store structs with certain defined lengths in a file.
You know what? XML isn’t looking so bad now.
If you want to break the AI ask instead what regex you should use to parse HTML.
I was reverse engineering fucking around with the LBX file format for our Brother label printer’s software at work, because I wanted to generate labels programmatically, and they’re zipped XML too. Terrible format, LBX, really annoying to work with. The parser in Brother P-Touch Editor is really picky too. A string is 1 character longer or shorter than the length you defined in an attribute earlier in the XML? “I’ve never seen this file format in my life,” says P-Touch Editor.