Re: [xml-dev] XML's greatest cultural advantage over JSON

[Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com>]

Browsers have always represented an impoverished development environment targeted to the broadest possible audience.  Unlike more traditional apps (desktop, server), they are constrained by having to run everywhere, on every device, with a single programming language (ok, there used to be VB Script, and of course plugins).  Is it any wonder that the choice of tools is limited there?

The strange thing (as Jirka pointed out) is that XML *was already in the browser*.  Unlike Flash, say, it didn't have to fight for its place there.  It had it -- and lost it.  Maybe for the reasons Jirka points out, I don't know.  Maybe because nobody cared much about coding in javascript back then when all it was good for was image rollovers and the other kinds of toy effects you could achieve with "dynamic html"

-Mike


On 04/29/2013 09:10 AM, Stephen D Green wrote:

CAA0AChVk=xkN4BUOacfX9pjfh61MtvLP+p6rc-F6hLYi-338=g@mail.gmail.com" type="cite">

Is the major blocker something to do with developers

wanting everything to be free and take minimal effort

in areas of software technology, whereas with the more

expensive RDBMSs and app frameworks (expensive

for their tools support, etc at least) the will to invest time

and effort is already there sufficient for supporting XML?

----

Stephen D Green

On 29 April 2013 14:02, Stephen D Green <stephengreenubl@gmail.com> wrote:

Just comparing the time it took for XML to be adequately

supported in RDBMSs and application frameworks like

.NET and Java and the time it has taken for it to be adequately

supported in Javascript (and browsers for that matter) and

you get the idea the latter have either been rather tardy or

have lacked strong user demand, or there has been some

other major blocker not suffered by RDBMSs and application

frameworks. It's probably too late to think that that will ever

be fixed. MicroXML doesn't seem to have made any impact

on the problem. Probably nothing will. (IMO of course)

----

Stephen D Green

On 29 April 2013 09:50, Jirka Kosek <jirka@kosek.cz> wrote:

On 28.4.2013 14:22, Simon St.Laurent wrote:

> XML had a chance with an open-minded crowd of people eager to embrace
> it.  By and large, we utterly failed to convince them.  Once other
> options emerged, they ran there.

I think that story is different. Javascript in browser doesn't have
usable XML API (DOM is simply ... DOM), but evaluating JSON with eval()
at that time was very easy (do you still remember E4X?). Also given the
browser security model you are unable to fetch cross-site XML resources,
but you can do the same with JSON-P. So with JSON it was possible to
walk around limitations in browser, nothing more. With better XML API in
browser and more reasonable security model situation between JSON/XML in
Web front-end development could be very different.

                                Jirka


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Michael Sokolov
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