> XML cannot be parsed into nested maps/dictionaries/lists/arrays without guidance from a type or a restricted xml structure.
? Using XML without a schema is slightly worse than JSON because the content of each node is just "text". XML with schema is far more powerful, also because of a richer type-system. JSON dictionaries are most of the time used to encode structs, but for that you have `complexType` and `sequence` in the XML schema.
I've been using XML with strongly-typed schemas for serialization for the last couple of years and couldn't be happier. I have ~100 classes in the schema, yet I've needed a true dictionary like 2 or 3 times.
> And we didn't even need to get into the needless complexity of validation, namespaces, and other junk.
Validation is junk? Isn't it valuable to know that 1) if your schema requires a certain element, and 2) if the document has passed validation, then navigating to that element and parsing it according to its schema type won't throw a run-time exception?
Namespaces are junk? They serve the same purpose as in programming languages. How else would you put two elements of the same name but of different semantics (coming from different sources) into the same document? You can fake this in JSON "by convention", but in XML it's standardized.
? Using XML without a schema is slightly worse than JSON because the content of each node is just "text". XML with schema is far more powerful, also because of a richer type-system. JSON dictionaries are most of the time used to encode structs, but for that you have `complexType` and `sequence` in the XML schema.
I've been using XML with strongly-typed schemas for serialization for the last couple of years and couldn't be happier. I have ~100 classes in the schema, yet I've needed a true dictionary like 2 or 3 times.
> And we didn't even need to get into the needless complexity of validation, namespaces, and other junk.
Validation is junk? Isn't it valuable to know that 1) if your schema requires a certain element, and 2) if the document has passed validation, then navigating to that element and parsing it according to its schema type won't throw a run-time exception?
Namespaces are junk? They serve the same purpose as in programming languages. How else would you put two elements of the same name but of different semantics (coming from different sources) into the same document? You can fake this in JSON "by convention", but in XML it's standardized.