"XML is a classic political compromise: it balances the needs of man and machine by being equally unreadable to both"
-- Matthew Might
In other words: XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files...
@fribbledom I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here, but it seems to me that you don't quite like XML.
Actually, I like it in the same sense that I really do like C++. Both are incredibly powerful, but also spiraled a bit out of control.
@fribbledom @eject I am using utf8 text with the ASCII characters 0x1c 0x1d 0x1e and 0x1f as separators (File Separator, Group Separator, Record Separator, Unit Separator), which gives me s-expressions with 4 levels of nesting. Beat that!
@fribbledom
Believe it not, at one point we thought #xml was a good idea. Then #json came along with its utter lack of structure and we all felt pretty stupid. 😒
@61 No worries, I'm sure twenty years from now I'll say the same kind of things about JSON, TOML, YAML and half a dozen other *ONs and *MLs 😂
@fribbledom
Not so sure. #json is sort of like #csv, something so simple that little can go wrong with it. Yeah, they both got lots of limitations and are academically awful. But as is said of #ethernet, they work better in practice than in theory.
It's the simple ideas that tend to stick around.
Btw, big fan of #yaml too! 😊
@fribbledom https://xkcd.com/927/