tmhsiao's Journal: Using XML

At a couple of my old positions, various people of varying levels of education always kept coming up with the hare-brained idea of making XML the defacto format for anything, from internal data files to configuration files. Granted, there is an advantage to this--there are XML parsers either built-in or readily available to just about every programming language in common use nowadays. Not that said people ever thought about using those parsers--they were just on the whole XML bandwagon from reading hypey trade mags.

The author of Thinking in Java, Bruce Eckel, in his article "Simplifying XML Manipulation," wrote the best description of why I personally think that XML is a poor choice for internal data files and just fucking stupid for config files:

My initial strategy for XML was to recognize it for what it is -- a platform independent way to move data from one place to another -- and then, as much as possible, to ignore it and assume that I would only have to actually look at XML when I was debugging something...

Fedex and the Post Office (and UPS apparently also works this way) -- [use] something that's almost XML-RPC, but it's not, and you're expected to assemble your XML by hand and then use HTTP to send it to the server, then unbundle the XML that comes back...

The point being that here's a case where the XML should have been invisible, but you have to mess with it by hand.