XML is like violence. Once you start using it, the solution to any problem will be just more XML.

had to laugh way too hard about this lol
@CodingPeasant

Make love, not XML!

If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The weird thing about XML (and by extension HTML) is how incredibly inefficient it is at structuring data.

And, if you're not generating it using a library, how incredibly error-prone the format is.

The person who thought that repeating the name to create a closing tag was a great idea, was a terrible engineer.

Xml is never the answer! Except where most of society is concerned!

I think that the hatred for XML is a tad too strong...

One of the things I loved was XPath.

Because it made a lot of stuff tremendously easy.

I think JSON Path is still no standard if I remember correctly...

... But at least it exists.

The saddest thing about XML were usually the libraries.

https://pypi.org/project/...

Just to give a reminder why ...

(Python specific libraries in this case, but the attack vectors existed in nearly all libraries no matter what language was used)

XML was and is still better than the CSV / XLS potpourri you got. ;)

Or TSV... and all it's abominations.

Hmm that's true

Maybe I should respond with violence the next time someone suggests xml

@bittersweet Why is repeating the name of the tag to close it a bad idea? I mean, it's pretty readable...

@spongegeoff

I've never found HTML that readable, although readability is subjective.

On complex hand-typed documents with lots of nesting and tag properties, it's easy to mess up, and indentation rules are not standardized.

The repetition in closing tags is redundant, and many ubiquitous elements require verbose boilerplate.

It would make more sense if it was just something like "div (.fooclass #bar) { content }". There's many syntax variants one could think of, the markup could also be 100% json compatible for example.

For human readability, I like a terse format with mandatory indentation, like haml for example.

XML, when used as a data transport or data storage, can just be fully replaced by JSON.

XML, when used for configuration, can be fully replaced by YML, TOML or similar formats.

@bittersweet XML is not replaceable by JSON.

JSON is just a data representation, XML is a markup language.

Very different things.

While XML is not a programming language, it's still a point to be made as a markup language is different than just representation of data.

ok. I was too fast.

My mistake.

Excuse me. Have some 🥞