Why is XML?

[Forogar]

It looks pretty good - ReSharper is going nuts on it but who cares!

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

[OriginalGriff]

Thanks for that - I use these for JSON, but I've not had an XML version before: JSON Utils: Generate C#, VB.Net, SQL Table, Java and PHP from JSON[^] Convert JSON to C# Classes Online - Json2CSharp Toolkit[^] Mostly because I'm not fond of XML ... come to think of it, I'm not fond of HTML either. :-D

"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

[Nelek]

THANK YOU A LOT :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

[glennPattonWork3]

Dang, what did Raddius say or do, he is trusted member of :bob:'s court.

[Gary R Wheeler]

I've found that .NET XML serialization works fine and is relatively simple as long as .NET is doing the round-tripping. I've occasionally had to write my own serializers, but that's usually fairly trivial. Adapting it to an existing schema or otherwise-specified form is a PITA. Instead of being able to say "handle this in XML", you essentially have to write code that implements the schema. This of course sucks, because the schema changes all the time (trust me, it's in the rules). You only get basic parsing out of the .NET XML support if you go this route.

Software Zen: delete this;

[Slacker007]

Marc Clifton wrote:

Lots of legacy systems or old API's that never got updated to JSON.

Exactly.

[Slacker007]

perhaps he tried to delete the post, and the system made the message closed because others responded? I thought it weird as well.

[Rick York]

It appears he posted a link to something that is verbotten.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

[realJSOP]

This article may help: Rudimentary ViewModel Class Generator[^] It deals specifically with entities from xml

".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

[fd9750]

Some guy somewhere had a bad dream and woke up with the idea: now how can I make something totally confusing and complicated which computers can read effortlessly but humans will find totally incomprehensible? He came up with XML and ticked all the necessary boxes/requirements perfectly. Personally I am not a fan of javascript but boy did they get that JSON stuff right. Whatever programming language you care to use the JSON data exchange is dead easy to follow and debug. Leave the hard interpreting stuff to computers, not humans. For god's sake: that is why we designed them for !!!

[Chris Maunder]

That's what killed me: I have a working implementation in Json but needed (evidently) to have it work in XML too. Json: it just worked. Next? XML: my life is a miserable series of pointless failures

cheers Chris Maunder

[KarstenK]

The XML-hype is history. try json it is smaller, better readable and a lot of parsers can handle it.

Press F1 for help or google it. Greetings from Germany

[Greg Utas]

I never had to suffer through this kind of pain. I mostly worked on a system that was originally developed when memory and CPU time couldn't be frittered away on messages the size of _.jpg_s. Our proprietary language prefixed pack(n) to the type to control a field's width, and it was easy to predict how it would lay out a struct. Developing everything in the same language and standardizing on endianism made it possible to read/write structs directly from/to messages that used TLV encoding (type=parameter id, length=bytes, value=struct, nested if necessary). Very efficient, and no serialization or deserialization. But processors were upgraded independently, so an interprocessor protocol had to remain backward compatible. In rare cases, this meant that an adapter in release n+k had to convert a message received from a processor still running release n.

Robust Services Core | Software Techniques for Lemmings | Articles
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

[kmoorevs]

Chris Maunder wrote:

Is anyone actively using XML as a data transport format?

Gosh yes, in a number of ways: 0: storing encrypted ftp credentials for desktop apps (yep, right out in the open on a web server) they get changed annually or as needed. 1: advertising program updates for desktop apps 2: uploading client data from desktop apps to a ftp/web server for processing, then maybe reporting 3: downloading client data from web apps to desktop apps (sql server 'for xml' is great) the xml loads directly into a datatable...life is good. Of course, it helps when you control both ends (creation and consumption) of the xml content. :)

"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse "Hope is contagious"

[trønderen]

I see XML (and even more: HTML) as a binary format. Not suitable for human consumption. XML is OK for something generated as a binary serialization, untouched by human hands. Evaluated as such, XML qualities are mediocre. I cannot imagine any binary Tag-Length-Value format worse than XML, by any standard. XML has a single force: You can edit it using vi! (Or for that sake: cat 0 > filename :-)) Not too long ago, I asked (in General Programming) for reactions to my proposal of have a friend of mine provide a lot of tabular data as Excel tables, rather than vi editable files. That was more or less universally condemned: Either, he should provide data as a vi editable text file - in the class of XML, CSV, YAML, JSON ... - or I should develop a tailor-made domain-specific data entry application, doing a complete validation of all input data. Thinking that an Excel sheet might contribute to validation, whatever checks were added, was just naive and worthless. I accept the arguments for a data entry application, as long as we recognize that text based binary formats such as XML, CSV, YAML, and JSON, are unfit for human consumption. They are binary: You have to be concerned about the representation, with regard to use of special characters, quoting, length restrictions, ... The contents isn't free. So, let's make data entry applications that are free. How easy is that, with XML, CSV, YAML or JSON as the user level data entry format? Once we have come that far: Why not use a truly binary format, most likely TLV based? If you admit that the user should never edit the file directly, neither with vi nor cat 0 > file, what is then the advantage of using XML, HTML, CSV, YAML, JSON, ... ? If anyone insists on obtaining the information in an "editable" format, generating it from a binary TLV representation is usually quite trivial. For the applications I manage, I can easily provide stored information in either "editable" format, or even (to some degree) accept input in those formats. Yet, any "editable" format is secondary. Simple tree structures, those that you can easily edit using vi (or cat 0 > filename) are easily handled, but if the data structures require cross-linking, you may need to use a some domain dependent data entry (or data manipulation) tool. You just can't handle complex structures neither in XML, YAML nor JSON; they have to be managed with specialized tools. The essential point for this discussion: XML, as well as other "editable" formats, is

[Mycroft Holmes]

many years ago my boss dictated that xml will be the transport format for the bank. Once you hit multi million complex records xml choked the server so that was one failed project (of many). We then converted back to csv.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP

[hevisko]

Chris Maunder wrote:

Is anyone actively using XML as a data transport format?

Jabber does. and it's run over LOW BANDWIDTH networks too ;)

[User 10331519]

Maybe I’m biased because I’ve been working with XML since it was invented, but I love it. My experience with it predates object serializers and whatnot, and I still find it simpler to roll my own much of the time to ensure that the output properly expresses the object’s purpose and usage. I use JSON for transport where appropriate, such as pulling data into a Vue app, but whenever I need to model data in JSON, I quickly lose patience. The absence of a named root node, namespaces, and attributes leads to a pretty weak representation of the facts that does a poor job of conveying the designer’s intent. Some have argued on this thread that XML is a binary format and not for human consumption, but I would much rather be given some XML to interpret than a bunch of JSON if I am tasked with querying the data. And a named end tag is pretty handy; not a fan of counting curly brackets! Of course, XML is supported by a suite of very mature standardized tools, the likes of which simply don’t exist in the JSON world yet.

Cheers, Keith

[UsernamesAreHard]

Every so often you come up against a problem that XML is perfectly suited to address. Not that long ago I needed to convert hierarchical CMS data into a structured, multi-file CSV format. I was translating content between two CMSssss. Creating an XML rendering format made exporting the content maintaining hierarchy and relationships trivial. XSLT was the ideal tool to manipulate the XML and re-write it as CSV. Doing it as code would have taken *a lot* longer, but I had an advantage that I spent a lot of time working with XSLT in the past. This approach is definitely not for the beginner. As a transport medium, there's better choices these days that weren't widely adopted or invented when XML was in its heyday.

[Member_14951258]

I have been using XML for data transmission and for data specification since 2000. What I like most of XML and XSD is that I can define several namespaces for different fields, this way, whenever I get a tag (e.g. ), it has implicity the scope of such tag, there are no doubt whether the belongs to a scope or to another because it comes with its namespace (e.g. can be "books" or "pencils"). If you define good XSD files, the XML will be parsed and be XSD-compliant with any language (C#, Java, Python...), serializing the XML documents into objects and viceversa. [There are other great things of XML that I really like, but it is not the aim of this discussion.] When I have to deal with personal data or some data regarding "money" (bills, business, purchases...) I always use XSD because I want to map the correct data into the correct field. For other, not sensible, data I use JSON. Important note: Beware of namespaces, the most common error when parsing is when namespaces are in-lined. Some XML are produced badly and the receiver launches weird errors that make developers eventually hate XML. I think that it can be the reason for your intolerance this morning :laugh: For data transmission, if the bandwidth is a problem, you can use EXI (Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0 (Second Edition)), which is better than compressing (gzip) JSON. But make sure that sender and receiver can manage EXI. To sum up, JSON is very easy, but I still prefer XML/XSD for important data or data that must be signed, verified or checked.