Re: [xml-dev] Four fine text-based data formats ... liberate yourselffro

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

(Liam)>So when you rail against XML and say how much more comfortable 
you are with JSON, it sounds to me as if you're really railing against 
those shoe-wearing bureaucratic civil engineers who wanted 
first-this-then-that. I agree that's a problem, although if several 
different organizations are involved it's often necessary politically if 
not technically, and the schema there can help (as David and others 
suggest) as a sort of documentation.


Actually I would contend that with XML it's much easier to handle data 
with a loose or evolving schema than it is with JSON. For example, 
changing a name-and-address format to allow multiple middle names or 
multiple phone numbers with different roles is more likely to be do-able 
without breaking existing applications in XML than it is in JSON.

This of course is assuming you are processing the XML with appropriate 
languages rather than with a language optimized to handle JSON...

In fact, one could argue that many of the difficulties that arise when 
processing XML arise precisely because of this flexibility that's 
designed into the notation. If you want to make XML processing easier in 
conventional languages, for example with Java data binding, the first 
thing you do is to lock down the schema.

Michael Kay
Saxonica