• ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    XML is ok for complex docs where you have a detailed structure and relationships. JSON is good for simple objects. YAML is good for being something to switch to for the illusion of progress.

    • Radioactive Butthole@reddthat.com
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      3 days ago

      Meh. I just wish XML was easier to parse. I have to shuttle a lot of XML data back and forth. As far as I can tell, the only way to query the data is to download a whole engine to run a special query language, and that doesn’t really integrate into any of my workflows. JSON retains the hierarchy and is trivially parsed in almost any programming language. I bet a JSON file containing the exact same data would be much smaller also, since you don’t list each tag twice.

      • bob_lemon@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        I still want someone to explain to me why XML even needs namespaces (which cause about 95% of all issues regarding XML).

        There is a way to separate different XML structures, it’s called files.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        2 days ago

        XML is also tricky to parse because people forget it is for documents too. It’s basically like HTML. Mixed content elements are allowed. <foo>hey <bar>there</bar> friend</foo> is valid XML. So iterating over elements is trickier than JSON (which is just key value pairs and arrays).

        • Radioactive Butthole@reddthat.com
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          2 days ago

          That’s kind of my point though. For being made specifically for the purpose of being machine readable, its kind of a pain in the ass to work with.

          I want a command line utility where I can just

          xmlquery --query 'some/query' --file foo.xml --output foo-out.xml
          

          or in python

          
          import xml
          
          with open("foo.xml", "r") as file:
              data = xml.load(file.read())
          

          That’s the amount of effort I want to put into parsing a data storage format.