Replacing std.xml

[Chris]

On Thursday, 29 August 2013 at 15:43:36 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> While I do agree that in the current state of affairs, XML 
> support is a
> must, I also think that XML is just way overengineered, IMNSHO. 
> It has
> adds too much overhead and therefore requires compression to be
> efficient, and it is needlessly complex for what it does (tag
> attributes, all the different cases of CDATA / non-CDATA, 
> etc.). This
> complexity makes it impractical to edit by hand, relegating it 
> to
> machine reading/writing only, which then begs the question of 
> why a
> binary format wasn't chosen instead. And don't get me started 
> on DTDs,
> which are incredibly convoluted and can't even express certain 
> things
> that one might want to express in an automatic validation 
> system. Or
> that 17-headed monster called XSLT, which, thankfully, is 
> fading into
> the obscurity of time.
>
> JSON is a nicer, simpler alternative, though there may be 
> limitations
> with it that I don't know about. Word on the street is that 
> many people
> are abandoning XML for JSON due to lower maintenance overhead 
> (and this
> includes one of my friends, who was a hardcore XML fanatic -- I 
> was
> frankly quite surprised when he told me he was considering 
> migrating to
> JSON, since the original reason he chose XML was so that his 
> data will
> future-proof... well, so much for *that*).
>
> But all of this is irrelevant... it doesn't alleviate the need 
> for a
> std.xml replacement, since we have to live in the real world 
> where XML
> exists and must be supported. :)
>
>
> T

I am moving away from XML too. Wanted to use it for a private 
project. But I soon realized the madness of it, especially when 
there are people involved who are not programmers and have no 
clue whatsoever about markup languages, data storage formats etc. 
I think JSON and YAML are good candidates for the private project 
which revolves around collecting words and phrases and archiving 
them. I don't know exactly what I will use, but XML definitely 
won't get the job.

DTD sounds too much like DDT!