std.xml2 (collecting features)

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 10 May 2015 at 08:54:09 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> It's worse than shabby, it's a horrible, horrible choice.  Not 
> just for data formats, but for _anything_.  XML should not be 
> used.

I feel the same way about XML, and I also think that having 
strong  aesthetic internal emotional responses is often necessary 
to achieve excellence in engineering.

> But why do we often end up dealing with these two?  
> Familiarity, that is the only reason.  XML seems familiar to 
> anybody who's written some HTML, and JSON became familiar to 
> web developers initially.  Starting from those two large 
> niches, they've expanded out to become the two most popular 
> data interchange formats, despite XML being a horrible mess and 
> JSON being too simple for many uses.

Sometimes you get to pick, but often not.  I can hardly tell the 
UK Debt Management Office to give up XML and switch to msgpack 
structs (well, I can, but I am not sure they would listen).  So 
at the moment for some data series I use a python library via PyD 
to convert xml files to JSON.  But it would be nice to do it all 
in D.

I am not sure XML is going away very soon since new protocols 
keep being created using it.  (Most recent one I heard of is one 
for allowing hedge funds to achieve full transparency of their 
portfolio to end investors - not necessarily something that will 
achieve what people think it will, but one in tune with the 
times).


Laeeth.