XML -- information architect, JSON -- program objects, HTML -- Webbrowse

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

The words below from Liam Quinn deserve to be in the xml-dev Hall of Fame. Brilliant insights Liam!

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On November 15, 2013 Liam Quinn wrote
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When you design an XML vocabulary, you are in control. You own your own data format. You are an information architect.

When you use JSON, you are often in the role of a programmer, an application designer, and the JSON format you design is a reflection of the objects in your program. The program owns the data.

When you use HTML, you are using a vocabulary designed primarily by Web browser people, and the Web browser is primary, not your data.

XML frees your information from being optimized for, and specific to, any one program. But the consequence of this is that it is not as convenient for the programmer. So programmers tend to dislike it.

Further, programmers were forced early on to use the DOM to work with XML, and this was so unwieldy that almost anything else was better.

XQuery is so interesting because it straddles all the worlds. Where the XML DOM takes the programmer-unfriendly aspects of XML and forces the programmer to deal with them, XQuery hides many of them. 

But for now at least yes, many programmers have good reasons to dislike XML, and it helps all of us in the XML world to understand these reasons.