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

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> 
> If only there was a simple api for xml... that was actually simple :)
> I'm sure the list could come up with a new one.
> 

I hate the term "impedance mismatch", but it captures well the idea that processing data is always going to be far easier if you use a programming language whose type system matches the data model of the data.

So manipulating JSON in Javascript, and XML in XSLT, are both always going to be a lot easier than manipulating XML in Javascript or JSON in XSLT.

Although the 4th design goal of XML was "It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents", it's not clear to me that this goal ever really influenced the design. If it had been taken seriously, the spec would have contained a data model and it would have been a much simpler one than the models (plural!) that had to be retrofitted after the event. Namespaces in particular were designed with total neglect of this objective.

Which is not to say, of course, that the data models of languages like Javascript are well-suited to modelling documents.

Michael Kay
Saxonica