- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.world
Some data formats are easy for humans to read but difficult for computers to efficiently parse. Others, like packed binary data, are dead simple for computers to parse but borderline impossible for a human to read.
XML bucks this trend and bravely proves that data formats do not have to be one or the other by somehow managing to be bad at both.
Just a while ago, I read somewhere: XML is like violence. If it doesn’t solve your problem, maybe you are not using it enough.
Strong competition from yaml and json on this point however
JSON not supporting comments is a human rights violation
I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it’s automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with
//
comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.
There is actually an extension to JSON: https://json5.org/
Unfortunately only very few tools support that.
Wouldn’t go that far, but it’s an annoyance for sure.
Alright, the YAML spec is a dang mess, that I’ll grant you, but it seems pretty easy for my human eyes to read and write. As for JSON – seriously? That’s probably the easiest to parse human-readable structured data format there is!
My biggest gripe is that human eyes cannot in fact see invisible coding characters such as tabs and spaces. I cannot abide by python for the same reason.
You can set those things to be visible in many editors. Its ugly tho
Until you’re doing an online course in a simplistic web editor. Don’t ask me how I know 🥲
The language should just let me specify which character I want for that. I would use “>”.
It would be a compiler directive, I think. Or let me type “end if” and just disregard the coding indentation
That’d be an editor thing rather than a language thing, I would have thought. It’s probably configurable in some
it is anything but easy to read if your entire file does not fit on a single screen.
what kind of config file is short enough to fit on a single screen with line breaks?
What data format is easy to read if it fills more than the entire screen?
The thing is, it was never really intended as a storage format for plain data. It’s a markup language, so you’re supposed to use it for describing complex documents, like it’s used in HTML for example. It was just readily available as a library in many programming languages when not much else was, so it got abused for data storage a lot.
That’s why professionals use XML or JSON for this kind of projects and SQL for that kind of projects. And sometimes even both. It simply depends on the kind of problem to solve.
I mean, it’s not wrong…
XML is good for markup. The problem is that people too often confuse “markup” and “serialization”.
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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.
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Of course you can use XML that way, but it is unnecessarily verbose and complex because you have to make decisions, like, whether to store things as attributes or as nested elements.
I stand by my statement that if you’re saving things to a file you should probably use XML, if you’re transferring data over a network you should probably use JSON.
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People may hate on SOAP but I’ve never had issues with setting up a SOAP client
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That’s my biggest peev about JSON actually. No comments!! WTH!
There’s comments in the specs and a bunch of parsers that actually inore //
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json spec draft 7
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And there are some truly magic tools.
XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.
XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.
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{ "key": "six", "value": 6, "comment": "6 is a bad number. Use five." }
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BASED. What is the name of this AI? I want to use this.
Listen we all know deep down the solution is to try to parse it with regex