It always seemed to me that most of the hate around XML was really misdirected hate for SOAP. XML (and particularly XSDs) I rather liked, but maybe I just never dove deep enough to feel the pain.
When XML hit the fan, it was the first time some of our Lisp-ignorant colleagues got a taste of notation for structured data.
But what a disappointing flop: basically just a recursively chopped-up chararacter string, with no notion of type whatsoever, and a huge amount of verbiage
No arrays or lists, no distinction between numeric and textual data. <foo>0xff</foo> might come out as 255 in one application or garbage in another.
In XML-land, you see ad-hoc notations within XML that are not part of it, like <temperatures>12.3, 13.7, 13.1, 12.9</temperatures>.
When people wrapped their heads around XML, though, it did become a tad easier to explain Lisp as being structured data (like XML) that represents code.
I just don't buy that there were enough Lisp devs around for that to be a significant source of the hate.
Besides, Json has plenty of those issues and doesn't garner a fraction of the distaste.
On the other hand SOAP and the tooling around it, particularly the tooling in the Java world which was a hot tech at that time, sucked - and so far as I could see a lot of devs didn't really draw a distinction between XML and SOAP.
Ok, actually SOAP probably didn't suck per se - but it was a wildly inappropriate tech for a lot of the problem spaces it was inflicted upon.
Comments
It always seemed to me that most of the hate around XML was really misdirected hate for SOAP. XML (and particularly XSDs) I rather liked, but maybe I just never dove deep enough to feel the pain.
Some of it has to be because people know Lisp.
When XML hit the fan, it was the first time some of our Lisp-ignorant colleagues got a taste of notation for structured data.
But what a disappointing flop: basically just a recursively chopped-up chararacter string, with no notion of type whatsoever, and a huge amount of verbiage
No arrays or lists, no distinction between numeric and textual data. <foo>0xff</foo> might come out as 255 in one application or garbage in another.
In XML-land, you see ad-hoc notations within XML that are not part of it, like <temperatures>12.3, 13.7, 13.1, 12.9</temperatures>.
When people wrapped their heads around XML, though, it did become a tad easier to explain Lisp as being structured data (like XML) that represents code.
I just don't buy that there were enough Lisp devs around for that to be a significant source of the hate.
Besides, Json has plenty of those issues and doesn't garner a fraction of the distaste.
On the other hand SOAP and the tooling around it, particularly the tooling in the Java world which was a hot tech at that time, sucked - and so far as I could see a lot of devs didn't really draw a distinction between XML and SOAP.
Ok, actually SOAP probably didn't suck per se - but it was a wildly inappropriate tech for a lot of the problem spaces it was inflicted upon.