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by candiddevmike4 hours ago |
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upvoteby dpe824 hours ago|
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It's a perfectly reasonable choice: flexible, well specified, well supported, reasonably performant. I think the extreme level of hype 20 years ago was overdone and (just like with anything) there's good ways to adopt it and bad ways. But as a basic technology choice, it's fine. Particularly these days when you can have a coding agent write the parser boilerplate, etc. for you.
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upvoteby wolrah2 hours ago|
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> It's a perfectly reasonable choice: flexible, well specified, well supported, reasonably performant. I think the extreme level of hype 20 years ago was overdone and (just like with anything) there's good ways to adopt it and bad ways. But as a basic technology choice, it's fine.

Absolutely with you up to here, but...

> Particularly these days when you can have a coding agent write the parser boilerplate, etc. for you.

Absolutely not. Having seen the infinite different ways a naive implementation of XML goes wrong, arguably being one of the main causes of death for XHTML because browsers rightfully rejected bad XML, "Don't roll your own XML implementation" should be right up there with "Don't roll your own crypto".

I don't feel like it's going out on a limb to say that if someone needs to defer to a LLM to implement XML they're not qualified to determine if it's done it right and/or catch what it got enthusiastically wrong.

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upvoteby stickfigure4 hours ago|
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XML is much better than JSON for document-oriented data like messaging and web pages. Use the right tool for the job.
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upvoteby Gigachad2 hours ago|
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IM messages aren’t really documents. They are text with some very minimal formatting that could be expressed with markdown. Any media attached isn’t embedded in the document, it’s attached externally / rendered at the bottom.

The only example I can think that messages are expressed as documents is Microsoft Teams. And it’s as much an example of what not to do as anything.

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upvoteby SahAssar43 minutes ago|
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IM messages seem to be documents just as much as email or many things you'd normally call documents. A reasonable definition IMO would be:

    A self-contained rich formatted text file/package that optionally contains attachments or media.
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upvoteby Gigachad31 minutes ago|
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I'd disagree with that for most messaging apps. If you think about Discord or Slack for example. You have a plain text message and then media attachments externally. This could be very well expressed with JSON.

Very few messaging apps let you go beyond plain text and let you start embedding media or complex layouts inside a message.

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upvoteby idle_zealot1 hours ago|
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Eh, XML is a machine-readable generic markup language. Why would you prefer using a less powerful format like markdown in a context like message representation? XML with inline tags seems the perfect fit.
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upvoteby Gigachad27 minutes ago|
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Less powerful also means less complex and less exploitable. You can very easily grab a markdown renderer rather than trying to decode a .docx for messages.

Pretty much no messaging apps let you create messages more complex than markdown anyway.

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