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The lost art of XML — mmagueta (marcosmagueta.com)
submitted 4 months ago by Kissaki@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. "Oh, XML," they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. "We use JSON now. Much cleaner."

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[-] Auster@thebrainbin.org 2 points 4 months ago

Skimming through the post, the code snippet about halfway through picked my attention. Been a while since I studied site development, but that snippet looks awfully like HTML. Are it and XML related?

[-] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 7 points 4 months ago

Yes. Arguably, HTML is a form of XML. Also, the ML means the same in both. XML tools can often also be used to query HTML documents.

[-] Auster@thebrainbin.org 3 points 4 months ago

Ooooh~

Thanks for the explanation!

[-] Kissaki@programming.dev 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There was a time where HTML moved towards a more formalized XML-valid definition named XHTML. Ultimately, web/browser backwards compatibility and messy and forgiving nature lead to us giving up on that and now we have the HTML living standard with rules, but browsers (not sure to what degree it's standardized or not) are very forgiving in their interpretation.

While HTML, prior to HTML5, was defined as an application of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a flexible markup language framework, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. XHTML documents are well-formed and may therefore be parsed using standard XML parsers, unlike HTML, which requires a lenient, HTML-specific parser.[1]

XHTML 1.0 became a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation on 26 January 2000. XHTML 1.1 became a W3C recommendation on 31 May 2001. XHTML is now referred to as "the XML syntax for HTML"[2][3] and being developed as an XML adaptation of the HTML living standard.[4][5]

[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

But nobody uses it anymore and uses a js-framework on a page instead. Which only 3 billion-dollar engines in the world can render.

[-] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

They're siblings. They both derive from SGML. There is a version of HTML that is also XML conformant called XHTML but it never caught on...

this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
66 points (93.4% liked)

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