XML is the George W. Bush of formats.
It was never good, we just have a sort of nostalgy for it after seeing lots of other nasty stuff.
@CobaltVelvet I could get behind that, most of what’s wrong with xml and yaml is that the standards are too big and complex. Cut like 80% of the spec and keep the basic parts, that would work. No WSDL and shit like that.
@szbalint I still quite like XML.
It feels like a language humans would actually use, as opposed to JSON which (once it reaches a certain level of complexity) is a real pain to troubleshoot and validate.
Also its the basis of RSS, which I'd feel sad to see disappear.
@szbalint I still like XML. I've seen some horrible stuff done with it though. I like the combination of XML and XSLT.
I'd like to like JSON and YAML but both have serious drawbacks for me. The justification for HCL puts it best at https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl.
@szbalint "JSON fits a nice balance in this, but is fairly verbose and most importantly doesn't support comments. With YAML, we found that beginners had a really hard time determining what the actual structure was, and ended up guessing more often than not whether to use a hyphen, colon, etc. in order to represent some configuration key."
@szbalint but was it really *bad*
let's say we make a standard xml subset, what's bad in it?