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The lost art of XML — mmagueta
(marcosmagueta.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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XML lost because it pretended to be human readable but it's actually a soup of punctuation, and pretended to be good for machines but is heavy to parse and transmit.
If there was an explanation for why XML lost to the likes of Avro and Thrift I didn't spot it.
I do think it's a shame that the only real alternative to JSON is the much more complex yaml, but I'll take it for most purposes.
There's TOML also which is very good for low-nesting, human authore data
It wasn't even just that. In the companies I worked, it seemed like nobody other than me understood how to escape things for XML. I couldn't even convince them to just use the right libraries/functions that auto-escape and parse things properly. They keep deciding they were smart enough to do it by hand. And it always ended up biting them.
JSON, like Javascript (vs C++ or Java) is a lot more forgiving. It either works or it doesn't, and the values are just strings or numbers. And some people even do the numbers as strings.
Fun JSON fact of the day: Why does JSON prohibit leading zeroes? Because in some parsers they will become octal!