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Comment by kotaKat | Hacker News Reader

I was told by someone that this will all get killed off in W11 "soon" because of a shell rewrite (again) to XML Hosting/Win32 and that "third party shell replacements will die soon" because of it.

https://www.neowin.net/news/new-system32-files-suggest-micro...

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Maybe that's MS' intent after all - complete control over the environment.

They're still using XML? Yuck. UWP was a horrible idea, but this new replacement might not be any better either.

Having used XAML in the past, I found it much nicer for the hierarchical nature of UIs than a pure code based approach.

What makes you feel that XML is “yuck” here?

I think a lot of people have an instinctively negative reaction to xml because json is so much nicer for data.

But for documents and document-like things such as user interfaces, I think tag based markup is a good fit. I mean html is doing better than ever, so why not xml? Not having 1gig worth of electrons is nice too.

Is JSON better for data? XML can be pretty powerful when used properly.

Yes. I think the main reason is that json maps so nicely to native types like dict, list, string and double. xml is usually deserialized to a dom object and accessing the right things is a bit more annoying and complicated.

Another thing with xml is that if you give it a finger it tries to take the whole arm and guilt you into using more and more xml technologies like xsd's and dtd's and namespacing and xslt's and before you know it you are neck deep in xml arcana.

Json is also more terse but that's less important.

Analyst here and not an active professional programmer outside of analytics.

Is there a way to specify a json schema like you do with xsd?

There are various competing standards for describing JSON schemas. Some use separate JSON files, others put details inside the JSON files themselves. None of them are fully standardised the way JSON or XSD are, though.

I've seen https://json-schema.org/ in use most often, but it's not directly associated with JSON and support depends on how close your software stack seems to be to Javascript frontend web development. It's still an IETF draft at the moment, and development seems to have stopped: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-bhutton-json-sch...

Alternatively, you could theoretically use YAML schemas to validate JSON, as standard JSON is also valid YAML.

I would argue that XSDs and namespacing are pretty much a necessity when you're trying to represent structured data. I agree that DTD and especially XSLT can be painful, but they're certainly more optional.

Being able to generate XSD from your code and then just pass that off to someone else while remaining generally language-agnostic is extremely powerful. JSON is cheap and easy, but it's really not that great.

The lead years of XML as the hammer to every nail and the subsequent adoption of json as the data format to be used have led many to feel that XML is the data format equivalent of COBOL and just as pretty.

There's nothing wrong with XML or XAML. There's even something to be said for UWP if it hadn't been for the foolish Metro style Microsoft enforced.

Why would that cause shell replacements to die, wouldn't they just need rewriting in part?

The traditional Windows desktop is quite open and has all sorts of extension APIs where 3rd party extensions can hook in. A rewrite might remove the extensibility for the sake of "security and privacy" (read: ad revenue)

Maybe, but the comment by "Malisk" under the linked neowin article seems like a more straightforward technical explanation that doesn't necessarily imply any such intent (I can't say anything about how accurate that comment is).

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