The lost art of XML — mmagueta

I've been in tech long enough to remember when XML entered the scene, well before JSON. There were all those years of XHTML, before everyone decided to just live with HTML5. It is unfortunate that there are many developers that think of XML and JSON as interchangeable. They really are very different things. Many teams likely have at least some data they are managing with JSON that would be better served as XML.

This is the pattern with JSON. We chose it because it was convenient, because it was already in the browser, because developers already understood object literals. Then, when its limitations became apparent, we spent enormous effort working around them: creating validation libraries, inventing type systems (TypeScript), building code generators for API clients, developing entire frameworks to manage the chaos of untyped data structures.

We could have just used XML. The schema validation was already there. The type systems were already there. The tooling was already there. But XML looked ugly, and closing tags felt verbose, so we chose JSON and then spent years rebuilding what XML already provided.

This last line is spot on.

This is not engineering. This is fashion masquerading as technical judgment.

…and is also not new. There is a long tradition of "fashion" in tech pursuing whatever tech because it is cool. That shouldn't be ignored because the crowd is right often, but not always.