Appropriate use of XML

by John on November 17, 2010

Daniel Lemire has an insightful article on good uses and bad uses of XML:

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1 Cyrille de Brébisson 11.18.10 at 00:41: a good use of XML is never in my opinion…

that thing sucks… it’s big, large and no more portable than normal clear text format as it is just as proprietary…
in all cases, it was easier and faster for me to just do a normal format of the type:
property=xxxxx
in addition, I am then much more portable as I am not slave to some randome xml parsing library that will be different in 2 years and only work on 1 version of an OS and requires my user to install the abormentionned library on his computer…
2 Mike Swaim 11.18.10 at 07:19: At my last job, I joined a project where they were using XML to communicate between components. The team lead profiled some of the apps and discovered that they were spending most of their time dealing with XML. We kept the XML support for unit tests, but internally switched to binary objects. It was really the wrong tool for the job.
The good thing about XML is that like HTML, it’s just text, and you can edit it in your text editor of choice.