By bloid
via codinghorror.com
Published: May 12 2008 / 14:36
Everywhere I look, programmers and programming tools seem to have standardized on XML. Configuration files, build scripts, local data storage, code comments, project files, you name it -- if it's stored in a text file and needs to be retrieved and parsed, it's probably XML. I realize that we have to use something to represent reasonably human readable data stored in a text file, but XML sometimes feels an awful lot like using an enormous sledgehammer to drive common household nails.
Comments
paul_houle replied ago:
Jeff's got a good point, but he misses the real issue.
We don't have good tools for working with XML documents. Every vendor comes out with two or three new API's every year because the old API's aren't entirely satisfactory.
The XmlReader and XmlWriter in .net are a well-developed API for reading and writing XML documents in a streaming mode. However, there are a lot of funky details -- it's easy to write a parser based on XmlReader that works for some input documents, then you get one that's a little different and it falls on it's face.
There are the API's that do a kind of XML to OO mapping. That might be a good idea, but you run into the same two-artifact problem that bedevils relational to OO mapping. Also those API's are always doing weird stuff behind your back -- things are working fine, then one day it's all busted because it decided to switch to some nonstandard charset.
dragmire replied ago:
Couldn't agree more with Jeff here.
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