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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

I still can't believe that we (as a profession) kinda traded away schemas, namespaces, comments, sanity and well defined dates basically because some kids were too cool to write out closing tags. My early 20s teammate now closes blocks with } //for in his JS. That's even worse than XML!

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Its incredible to look back at the arguments against XML and XHTML and realise just how poorly thought out they were.

Now, we've wasted the past few decades re-implementing everything that XML provided, but worse, and will spend the next few decades doing that all over again.

99% of the arguments in this industry are straw men or false equivalencies back by nothing but assertions and gut feel. There is little engineering in the field.

Personally I just miss Dates. Even if I dont really like not having comments, it is probably for the best, force software to have proper documentation.

That's all fancy fluff. It's just optional benefit, we don't need all that in most cases. So if we add the flaws of XML into the evaluation, it naturally loses in most use cases.

Maybe we need a Kotlin for XML. I mean a JSON-like, simple syntax without some of the verbosity of XML.

JSON has schemas. Namespaces are simple, just add something like "namespace": "mynamespace" if you really need it. Comments are not really needed for machine readable formats and many JSON parsers allow comments if you need it for configs, so that's hardly an issue. Well defined dates are strings in ISO8601 format. It's not standardized with JSON, but not an issue I encounter on practice.

JSON itself doesn't have support for scheme of comments as far as I'm aware. Both are supported by individual rolls building on top of JSON rather than those features being part of the JSON spec.

Whether that stiffener matters to someone is up them, but that difference is what many comments on this thread are pointing out with regards to us having spent a decade rebuild many features of XML back into JSON.

XML does not have support for schemas either. XML Schemas is a separate spec (and actually not the only one, there were few competing ones).

I'd use JSON schema over XML schema any day. And I read and wrote many XML schemas and still do sometimes. JSON schema actually built by sane people. If that required a decade, so be it.

Oh that's interesting, I always thought schema names pacing was a part of the XML spec, learned something new!

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