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Comment by felixfbecker | Hacker News Reader

I get that XML is not cool anymore but JSON is really a terrible language to define user interfaces. This smells like using JSON for the sake of using JSON.

There's a reason why JSX (basically XML in JS) is so popular and not some JSON definition of HTML. Even Windows apps have XAML so the UI doesn't have to be defined in C# objects.

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I think Flutter does a great job of doing UI using objects with zero xml.

I also can't stand JSX. It feels like inverted PHP to me (which I suppose makes sense since it's Facebook)... but I guess it's all just a matter of taste.

Could you share an example as to why you think JSX feels like inverted PHP? I think it is an interesting perspective.

I think the parent is referring to how you write PHP templates, which are HTML at the top level, but escape to raw PHP code inside particular delimiters (<?php>), whereas for JSX you write JS at the top level and 'escape' (kinda) to HTML in your returned element. Not exactly an inversion, but I can see the connection.

Really just the weird mix of xml and code

PHP is sticking code (php) in html

JSX is sticking xml (html-ish) in code (JavaScript)

Flutter does some job, definitely not great.

JSX is not XML, it is Javascript. The point of XAML (and this JSON thing) is to build declarative UI that can be authored and displayed without evaluating something like Javascript.

For that use case, I do not believe JSON is any worse than XML for authoring, but really you want some sort of GUI for it. Programmers, especially those living in terminals, tend to hate such stuff, of course.

If I recall, Alexa Presentation Language, the way to define UI for Alexa skills, is also some unholy JSON nightmare.

JSON is great for programmatic manipulation, but horrible to read as a programmer.

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