hot take i will absolutely not stand by in a few hours
xml is actually great, both to read and write, by humans and machines (at least as a subset of xml).
i kinda miss having xml everywhere
json awful to write and unreadable without indentation (counting the ]} )
yaml is far too complicated and intuitive for what it achieves
toml is nearly that but it's too flat, it's just not the same
@CobaltVelvet Also, XML is easy to grasp if you're not à developper. JSon is really obscur if you don't know JavaScript.
@Sylvhem @CobaltVelvet uh huh.... try explaining to a non-technical xml user why they can't have overlapping tags when annotating text ("<a>some text <b> some more </a> text but longer </b>")
@CobaltVelvet @Sylvhem one xml tag is for marking lines of poetry, the other is for marking places referenced. how else would you do it?
obviously, *I* understand why this is a bad idea, but good luck explaining that to a mechanical engineering major trying to finish their humanities project
@nightpool I don't know. I think mechanical engineering major can probably handle boxes.
@nightpool @CobaltVelvet @Sylvhem one answer is that even hand-written xml should be used within tooling that clearly explains, highlights, and does not permit errors. nxml in emacs is a good example of this.
@nightpool @CobaltVelvet @Sylvhem but for the most part I think xml isn't very suited to hand-editing.
I do think it gets more hate than is fair. Plain json can often be much worse. But xml has serious problems... the inability to have insiginificant whitespace is one.
@cwebber @CobaltVelvet @Sylvhem .... ah, yes, let's try and convince the non-technical users to use emacs, I'm sure that will sort everything out :P
@nightpool @CobaltVelvet @Sylvhem non technical users just shouldn't be hand editing json or xml or any of those things. they should have tools that generate that stuff for them.
@nightpool @CobaltVelvet @Sylvhem that said, I'm not saying that everyone should use emacs, just that I thought this was one place that did it right :)
@cwebber @CobaltVelvet @Sylvhem
well, all i'm trying to do is argue against the two claims made in this thread:
- "xml is good to write by humans" (contrasted to "json is awful to write")
- xml is easy to grasp if you're not a developer
if you don't agree with these claims then your contributions *might* be slightly off topic :P
@nightpool @Sylvhem why would they put a box half inside another box, half outside the other box