Comment by mattmanser
20 hours ago
Part of the problem was it came in an era before we really understood programming, as a collective. We didn't even really know how to encapsulate objects properly, and you saw it in poor database schema designs, bizarre object inheritance patterns, poorly organised APIs, even the inconsistent method param orders in PHP. It was everywhere. Developers weren't good at laying out even POCOs.
And those bizarre designs went straight into XML, properties often in attributes, nodes that should have been attributes, over nesting, etc.
And we blamed XML for the mess where often it was just inexperience in software design as an industry that was the real cause. But XML had too much flexibility compared to the simplicity of the later JSON, meaning it helped cause the problem. JSON 'solved' the problem by being simpler.
But then the flip side was that it was too strict and starting one in code was a tedious pita where you had to specify a schema even though it didn't exist or even matter most of the time.
Nah, we still have all those issues and more.
The hard truth is that XML lost to the javascript-native format (JSON). Any JavaScript-native format would have won, because "the web" effectively became the world of JavaScript. XML was not js-friendly enough: the parsing infrastructure was largely based on C/C++/Java, and then you'd get back objects with verbose interfaces (again, a c++/java thing) rather than the simple, nested dictionaries that less-skilled "JS-first" developers felt at ease with.
The thing is, JSON is even superior in C++.
It's a dumber format but that makes it a better lingua franca between all sorts of programming languages, not just Javascript, especially if you haven't locked in on a schema.
Once you have locked in on a schema and IDL-style tooling to autogenerate adapter classes/objects, then non-JSON interchange formats become viable (if not superior). But even in that world, I'd rather have something like gRPC over XML.
that's the thing, XML should have become javascript native so that we could write inline HTML more easily like JSX from react allows us to do.
It did somewhat. It was called E4X.
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This is the abstract idealism I was talking about: Every pro-XML person I've talked to wants to discuss XML in the context of a hypothetical perfect world of programming that does not exist, not the world we inhabit.
The few staunch XML supporters I worked with always wanted to divert blame to something else, refusing to acknowledge that maybe XML was the wrong tool for the job or even contributing to the problems.