Re: [xml-dev] How long before services sending/receiving XML might need

[Norman Gray <norman.gray@glasgow.ac.uk>]

Steve, hello.

On 14 Nov 2021, at 8:31, Stephen D Green wrote:

> Yet the challenges of creating fairly simple
>  XML documents today, even with XML-era technology such as .NET, are getting
>  worse because XML support is never updated.

Could you say a little bit more about this?  I'm not aware of there being a challenge here, which makes me think I'm misunderstanding your whole point.

Different languages have different APIs for this, and while they're sometimes a bit annoying (apart from Racket's, which is lovely), I wouldn't call them a challenge.  Python's API is sufficiently un-pretty that I use a home-made one (at about 50 lines of code), but that was mostly the product of procrastination, and a desire to use something a bit more Racket-ish.  I remember Java's API being annoyingly fiddly, but no more than the rest of Java.  And crucially, I don't see any of these being more fuss than learning an API to output JSON.

Are you thinking about problems at very large scale, or with relatively exotic XML?  By that I mean XML involving PIs, DTDs, CDATA sections, and all that jazz, which I generally wouldn't put under the heading of 'simple XML documents.

XML input is certainly more of a fuss than a JSON reader, but that's simply because XML has a more intricate syntax than JSON.  And I don't think anyone disagreeing that there are plenty of cases where XML would be an overcomplicated format for a simple serialisation problem.

> For example, just converting
>  UTF-8 XML to UTF-16 requires conjuring tricks with serialisation which
>  cause memory leaks, and the kinds of string buffer and stream conversions
>  that would baffle any developer except an XML specialist.

Isn't that just iconv?

Changing encodings will always require a little bit of nous, which is avoided in JSON by the simple (wise) expedient of mandating a single encoding for all.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK