In mid-September, we reported that Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, planned to step down from the project. A few days ago, that change became official.
When looking at one of the latest commits in the project’s GitLab repository, you can now see the following notice:
“This project is unmaintained and has known security issues (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/346). It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.”
I hope this is a nail in the coffin for xml. It’s just so unpleasant to work with, even through great libraries.
Wishful thinking. XML is going to be around for a very long time.
two have expressed interest in taking over: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/commit/9c80a89af2fdf4f853892f84e46580f4902658ba#note_2626536
Yes, things will be so much better when we eventually replicate all of XML’s functionality in JSON.
It’s great for non-HTML markup, like https://hyperview.org/.
A lot of the hate is undeserved. It has had awful paradigms built around it (like SOAP), but that doesn’t make XML inherently bad by any means.
Sure it is, but I don’t see a good enough replacement.
Although I have only used XML a couple of times, which were in other people’s projects, and considering their low complexity, they might as well have used JSON, XML does have a space where JSON is not good enough.
Out of curiosity, why do you consider XML unpleasant to work with?
Not the one you asked, but I don’t like XML compared to alternatives like JSON.
The main problem with XML is that it’s an unnecessarily complicated standard. There are often multiple ways to represent the same thing, each with their own gotchas and drawbacks.
JSON on the other hand has a much simpler standard. The entire JSON standard fits easily in one page. It’s also closer to how data is actually represented in memory. There’s often one ideal way to represent whatever you have in memory to a JSON file, and the reverse is also true.
Despite it’s simplicity, JSON covers most cases XML would cover. Often in a more elegant way.
If you like pain, then XML is the right choice for you.