- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.world
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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.
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.
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?
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.
There are people who find XML hard to read?
I see you’ve never worked with SOAP services that have half a dozen or more namespaces.
Over time I have matured as a programmer and realize xml is very good to use sometimes, even superior. But I still want layers between me and it. I do output as yaml when I have to see what’s in there
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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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That’s my biggest peev about JSON actually. No comments!! WTH!
On one hand I agree, on the other hand I just know that some people would immediately abuse it and put relevant data into comments.
This is why there are none, but I still think it’s dumb. Parsers can’t see comments anyways.
That’s assuming people actually use a parser and don’t build their own “parser” to read values manually.
And before anyone asks: Yes, I’ve known people who did exactly that and to this day I’m still traumatized by that discovery.
But yes, comments would’ve been nice.
There’s comments in the specs and a bunch of parsers that actually inore //
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json spec draft 7
{ "key": "six", "value": 6, "comment": "6 is a bad number. Use five." }deleted by creator
People may hate on SOAP but I’ve never had issues with setting up a SOAP client
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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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I mean, it’s not wrong…
Disagree. I prefer XML for config files where the efficiency of disk size doesn’t matter at all. Layers of XML are much easier to read than layers of Json. Json is generally better where efficiency matters.
TOML or bust
finally accurate ai
Listen we all know deep down the solution is to try to parse it with regex
I hate writing xml with a passion
If you are writing it then you are doing it wrong.
It’s not a waste of time… it’s a waste of space. But it does allow you to “enforce” some schema. Which, very few people use that way and so, as a data store using JSON works better.
Or… we could go back to old school records where you store structs with certain defined lengths in a file.
You know what? XML isn’t looking so bad now.
If you want to break the AI ask instead what regex you should use to parse HTML.
Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.
Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.
…and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.
A word document is xml
zipped xml!
Lots or file formats are just zipped XML.
I was
reverse engineeringfucking around with the LBX file format for our Brother label printer’s software at work, because I wanted to generate labels programmatically, and they’re zipped XML too. Terrible format, LBX, really annoying to work with. The parser in Brother P-Touch Editor is really picky too. A string is 1 character longer or shorter than the length you defined in an attribute earlier in the XML? “I’ve never seen this file format in my life,” says P-Touch Editor.Sounds like it’s actually using XSLT or some kind of content validation. Which to be honest sounds like a good practice.
Here’s an example of a text object taken from the XML, if you’re curious: https://clips.clb92.xyz/2024-09-08_22-27-04_gfxTWDQt13RMnTIS.png
EDIT: And with more complicated strings (like ones havingnumbers or symbols - just regular-ass ASCII symbols, mind you) there will be tens of <stringItem>, because apparently numbers and letters don’t even work the same. Even line breaks have their own <stringItem>. And if the number of these <stringItem> and their charLen don’t match what’s actually in pt:data, it won’t open the file.
BASED. What is the name of this AI? I want to use this.
I’m sorry which LLM is this? What are its settings? How’d you get that out of it?
And how did it give sources?
I’m sorry which LLM is this?
It’s perplexity.ai. I like it because it doesn’t require an account and because it can search the internet. It’s like microsoft’s bing but slightly less cringe.
How’d you get that out of it?
The screenshot is fake. I used Inspect Element.
XML is good for markup. The problem is that people too often confuse “markup” and “serialization”.
Too redundant, just use S-exprs.
(Mostly joking, but in some cases…)
Unironically.
Given the choice between S-expressions and XML, I will choose S-expressions.
It is very cool, specifically as a human readable mark down / data format.
The fact that you can make anything a tag and it’s going to be valid and you can nest stuff, is amazing.
But with a niche use case.
Clearly the tags waste space if you’re actually saving them all the time.
Good format to compress though…
I don’t mind xml as long as I don’t have to read or write it. The only real thing I hate about xml is that an array of one object can mistaken for a property of the parent instead of a list
I think we did a thread about XML before, but I have more questions. What exactly do you mean by “anything can be a tag”?
It seems to me that this:
<address> <street_address>21 2nd Street</street_address> <city>New York</city> <state>NY</state> <postal_code>10021-3100</postal_code> </address>Is pretty much the same as this:
"address": { "street_address": "21 2nd Street", "city": "New York", "state": "NY", "postal_code": "10021-3100" },If it branches really quickly the XML style is easier to mentally scope than brackets, though, I’ll give it that.
Since XML can have attributes and children, it’s not as easy to convert to JSON.
Your JSON example is more akin to:
<address street_address="21 2nd Street" city="New York" ...></address>Hmm, so in tree terms, each node has two distinct types of children, only one of which can have their own children. That sounds more ambiguity-introducing than helpful to me, but that’s just a matter of taste. Can you do lists in XML as well?
No arrays are not allowed. Attributes can only be strings. But the children are kind of an array.
YAML for human-written files, JSON for back-to-front and protobuf for back-to-back. XML is an abomination.
Having an easy on the eyes markdown that is also easy to parse would be cool.
But YAML does these things:
https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
which are not excusable, for any reason.
a wate of time
I’m starting to like this AI thing…
RSS/ATOM has to be the best thing to come out of XML
