Why XML Doesn't Suck

Richard Eriksson writes "Recalling the earlier discussion on why XML sucks for programmers, Tim Bray clarifies his stance on his co-creation, XML, and gets back on his pulpit to declare that XML Doesn't Suck. He writes: 'Let's look at some of XML's chief virtues, then I'll address some of the XML-sucks arguments, in the same spirit that Sammy Sosa addresses a fastball.'"

Comments

I DO hate XML

[ruiner13]

I have to write SOAP calls for our .NET website, and i'll be damned if XML isn't the most irritating language ever. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone could agree on syntax, but since XML is so vague of a language for every implementation there is a different syntax, even amongst the SOAP standard XML specs. I am currently working on hafing our website make a SOAP call to a PERL::Lite SOAP server, and can't get the .NET to get the right data out of the response, even though the Perl server understands the .NET request fine, and is sending the right response. If it was really the panacea for programmers, there would be no interoperability problems. Sure, a human can look at any XML schema and know what is going on, but computers are the ones who have to deal with it, and they seem to have problems frequently.

Just my 2 cents.

Re:I DO hate XML

[Mr. McGibby]

You make a good point, but don't go far enough.

I think the original poster's point was that XML allows for so much abiguousness, that every tool seems to do it differently and none of them can understand each other. The standard should be so strict as to *require* that if the same representation of a "piece of data" is made by two different tools, the representation should be exactly the same. No reason to say, "oh, you can put an endline there if you want, or you can end a tag these two different ways, whatever suits your fancy.

Sure, the tools should have been written so that they all followed whatever standard is out there, but we all know that that doesn't happen. The standard should *force* the tool writer to be anal about the standard and follow all the conventions.

A good compiler should do as good a job as possible to warn you of errors, before they become runtime errors (because those are harder to find). In the same way, a language should be designed such that more errors are compiler than run-time. In the same way, a standard should nearly impossible to create a file that doesn't follow the standard perfectly and still work. XML folks actually tout the opposite as a benefit!

A tool is written and most of the time is tested with itself, and thus *seems* to work, but doesn't really.

XML Confers Longevity

[Spudnuts]

Mr. Bray makes a point about the longevity of XML based documents (where he says that tying up documents in a binary format is foolish), but this is a point that (La)TeX users have been arguing for years.

Will XML really solve this problem? Hopefully the OpenOffice format will help, but if Microsoft maintains its marketshare (and keeps its XML generation limited or even proprietary), are we really better off?

I'll just stick with LaTeX.

basically why it doesn't suck

[xagon7]

I havn't read the article yet, but XML does NOT suck because:

1. the data and/or fields added at anytime WITHOUT breaking anything

2. the data is in a heiracherical format, reducing data replication and allowing for a more sophisticated data structure.

3. the daya can be changed by a text editor.

4. and BECAUSE the data is text, it compresses REALLY well.

What's the big deal?

[Telex4]

I don't get all this fuss over XML. It seems to me that it's just a pretty handy markup language for programmers to use to store data in a human-readable (and therefore human-editable) fashion, that (with the help of things like libxml) also happens to be fairly machine readable. It's also extensible (X- duh!) and yet also has its limits.

Why are there so many /. stories about this? Can somebody explain why this raises people's passions so? It seems to me like arguing the merits of HTML or SGML - it's all so bloody obvious!

I agree, XML does not suck

[dsoltesz]

As a web developer & admin, XML is my best friend. I have cases where I need non-webheads to develop content (better yet, portable content), and XML is the only way - they only have to know a basic set of HTML tags, they don't have to worry about HTML validation, formatting, or anything else, and everything they generate is consistent!

Not ony can I transform their content into different views or formats, but (for example) the same XML file that is used to provide software documentation also is used to build the software GUI and provide tool tips and other forms of context sensitive help.

No database required. No parsing required. Just a couple libraries and tools, and we're set to go.

Code embedded in XML

[CyberGarp]

I saw a letter to Dr. Dobbs recently that was saying that XML needed to have the ability to embed things like Visual Basic and javascript in it to be really useful. I think that this is a horrible idea. The whole point of XML was to have a generic data model, i.e. one parser to rule them all.

I've been able to do thing like export MySQL schemas into XML, then using XSLT generate an entire set of base classes providing persistent objects. What was once weeks worth of work, now takes an afternoon (from concept to final product). The whole set is entirely consistent, no misspelled names or changed signatures. When bugs were found, I fixed all the files in one place and rerun the XML/XSLT script. Massive productivity boost. If that isn't an argument on why XML doesn't suck I don't know what is.

The idea of embedding code in XML is a perverse distortion of what XML is really about. XML would suck if one uses it for unintended purposes. I don't use a hammer to tighten machine bolts, well I guess some people do.

A bit off topic...

[ed1park]

poking around his site I came across this. hehe.

"Slashdot and Stupidity I visit Slashdot once per day, sometimes more, because they seem to do a really good job of relaying the geek zeitgeist. It's a long time since I read much of the follow-ups, but I thought I ought to this time, and I'm reminded why. How can a publication that caters (on the face of it) to smart people attract the attention of so many shallow, drivelling morons?"

"Interactivity Again There were a few smart things there in among the chaff on /., and by following back the links in from other blogs, I sure did learn a whole bunch about the state of the programming art as regards XML. Some of the things I said were wrong (or at least open to challenge), and I got fodder for a really substantial follow-up piece, which I'll get around to soon. I don't suppose it's mathematically possible for everyone to get their theses batted around by some tens of thousands of well-informed people, which is a real pity."

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/1 9/ Who

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a VAN (Value Added Network) which is basically a middleman for data. You send an electronic purchase order to us; the company you're ordering from gets it from us. The value we add is we'll say you sent and tell you they got it.

However, we charge by the kilocharacter of data you send and receive per month. So, for us, XML is awesome, because it increases the size of an ASCII-X12 or EDIFACT document by a factor of 5-a lot more (usually somewhere around 15-20 I think).

X12 and EDIFACT are standards for business document exchange that have been around for a while, but people are converting to XML because they think it's better (eventhough, usually, they just use the X12 or EDIFACT format, but with XML tags).

For example, a line item record may go from something like this:

LIN:0001

to something like this:

<LIN_GROUP>
<LIN>
<LIN_01>0001</LIN_01>
</LIN>
</LIN_GROUP>

It's not always that bad, but it can also be much worse. (Imagine replacing each instance of "LIN" above with "Line_Item" and "LIN_01" with "Line_Item_Number".) (And why won't that semi-colon after the LIN_01 end tag go away?)

so-- for us, XML doesn't suck-- it increases our revenue. For our clients, it's sucks, because it increases their monthly bill.

XML is really nice

[amalcon]

Two words:
Human-readable.

As a programmer, this is the most useful property a data stream can take on. Why? Debugging. The reasoning here is twofold:

1. Non-parallel development of opposite ends of the data stream:
It's quite a challenge to develop the code which produces the data and the code which uses the data at the same time. If it doesn't work, you don't know where the problem is. With a human-readable format, you can simply pipe the data in or out of the app directly from a text file, and verify that it's correct yourself.

2. Debugging:
Something of an extention of the previous, if you have two bits of code communicating through XML, you can log the bad transmission and read it yourself to find out if the bug is in transmission or reception.

Now, I won't pretend that XML is the only human-readable data-structuring format, but it has a lot of nice advantages over the others, each of which is covered in the article. XML makes apps a pain to develop, but a breeze to debug--and the debugging is far more important!

XML definitely does not suck, XSL does somewhat

[Artful Codger]

... Like most of folks here, we've successfully used it in several situations, across different languages (Java, Perl, ASP) and different purposes(configuration, data transfer, web page generation, small online data storage, etc). It's da bomb.

XSL/XSLT on the other hand can be a pain to use in anything other than trivial transforms, in my unschooled opinion. The concept of recursive processing is great, but the math/logic syntax available is byzantine (eg "variable" is really a constant).

*sigh* I know this will get modded offtopic, but seriously... anyone agree with me, or do you actually like writing transform logic and processing in XSL? Please comment.

Conversion...

[ackthpt]

Um. Ok, I actually read the whole article and it has influenced my to change the direction, or consider strongly doing so, exporting data for archival purposes. We have an old system which will go out the door in the near future and I have been charged with archiving tables from a database in some form which makes they easily readable for auditing purposes, or for the more masochistic, able to be plugged into their happy little desktop database of choice (usually Access.) That said.

That said, the challenge stems from MV-fields. Those nifty things in PICK which give you the power of keeping associated fields within one table, with as many associations as you like. (for good or for bad, bad usually when it's been abused or good housekeeping neglected.) Piling MV stuff into CSV is just plain icky. Normalizing it first is also icky. However XML may offer a simple, elegant way of keeping it all together in the shape it existed in (which may be important down the road if someone has to produce a report from it (auditors, second guessers, or a55-covering because some account didn't have the right amount of debits or credits for years and the difference needs to be found.)

I'm off to explore XML more fully. There's probably yet-another O'Reilly book in my future...