• AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    Some data formats are easy for humans to read but difficult for computers to efficiently parse. Others, like packed binary data, are dead simple for computers to parse but borderline impossible for a human to read.

    XML bucks this trend and bravely proves that data formats do not have to be one or the other by somehow managing to be bad at both.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago

      The thing is, it was never really intended as a storage format for plain data. It’s a markup language, so you’re supposed to use it for describing complex documents, like it’s used in HTML for example. It was just readily available as a library in many programming languages when not much else was, so it got abused for data storage a lot.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        That’s why professionals use XML or JSON for this kind of projects and SQL for that kind of projects. And sometimes even both. It simply depends on the kind of problem to solve.

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          2 months ago

          IIRC, the original reason was to avoid people making custom parsing directives using comments. Then people did shit like "foo": "[!-- number=5 --]" instead.

        • Codex@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I wrote a powershell script to parse some json config to drive it’s automation. I was delighted to discover the built-in powershell ConvertFrom-Json command accepts json with // comments as .jsonc files. So my config files get to be commented.

          I hope the programmer(s) who thought to include that find cash laying in the streets everyday and that they never lose socks in the dryer.

      • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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        2 months ago

        Alright, the YAML spec is a dang mess, that I’ll grant you, but it seems pretty easy for my human eyes to read and write. As for JSON – seriously? That’s probably the easiest to parse human-readable structured data format there is!

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          My biggest gripe is that human eyes cannot in fact see invisible coding characters such as tabs and spaces. I cannot abide by python for the same reason.

        • Redex@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I don’t know much apart from the basics of YAML, what makes it complicated for computers to parse?

          • lime!@feddit.nu
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            2 months ago

            the spec is 10 chapters. everything is unquoted by default, so parsers must be able to guess the data type of every value, and will silently convert them if_they are, but leave them alone otherwise. there are 63 possible combinations of string type. “no” and “on” are both valid booleans. it supports sexagesimal numbers for some reason, using the colon as a separator just like for objects. other things of this nature.

            • daddy32@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Yes, the classic “no” problem of YAML. But the addition of the comments is very nice.

          • mynameisigglepiggle@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Sometimes it’s a space, sometimes its a tab, and sometimes it’s two spaces which might also be a tab but sometimes it’s 4 spaces which means 2 spaces are just whack And sometimes we want two and four spaces because people can’t agree.

            But do we want quotes or is it actually a variable? Equals or colon? Porque no los dos?

    • jimitsoni18@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      Just a while ago, I read somewhere: XML is like violence. If it doesn’t solve your problem, maybe you are not using it enough.

      • actually@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Over time I have matured as a programmer and realize xml is very good to use sometimes, even superior. But I still want layers between me and it. I do output as yaml when I have to see what’s in there

        • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          But is that the fault of XML, or is the data itself just complex, or did they structure the data badly?

          Would another human readable format make the data easier to read?

    • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      IMHO: XML is a file format, JSON is a data transfer format. Reinventing things like RSS or SVG to use JSON wouldn’t be helpful, but using XML to communicate between your app’s frontend and backend wouldn’t be either.

        • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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          2 months ago

          The amount of config.jsons I’ve had to mess with…

          Yeah, json is not a good config format. As much as xml is not. Please use something like YAML or TOML.

          • mrinfinity@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            I never moved away from ini I’ve just been sititng back watching you all re-invent the wheel over and over and over and over and over.

            • reinei@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              It’s a wheel, it’s supposed to turn over and over and over and infinitum!

              /S (because it’s big sarcasm instead of small.)

          • toastal@lemmy.ml
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            2 months ago

            I wish more things used Nickel or Dhall for config. I don’t know why I wouldn’t want editor support for type information or the ability to make functions in my non-Turing-complete config to eliminate boilerplate on my end.

        • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
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          2 months ago

          Of course you can use XML that way, but it is unnecessarily verbose and complex because you have to make decisions, like, whether to store things as attributes or as nested elements.

          I stand by my statement that if you’re saving things to a file you should probably use XML, if you’re transferring data over a network you should probably use JSON.

          • sik0fewl@lemmy.ca
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            2 months ago

            Why? JSON hasn’t given us anything XML hasn’t, except maybe a bit of terseness.

            I do agree SOAP is a bit over engineered, though, but that’s not the fault of XML.

      • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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        2 months ago

        On one hand I agree, on the other hand I just know that some people would immediately abuse it and put relevant data into comments.

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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            2 months ago

            I have actually seen it in an XML file in the wild. Never quite understood why they did it. Anything they encoded into there, they could have just added a node for.
            But it was an XML format that was widely used in a big company, so presumably somewhere someone wrote a shitty XML parser that can’t deal with additional nodes. Or they were just scared of touching the existing structure, I don’t know.

          • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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            2 months ago

            That’s assuming people actually use a parser and don’t build their own “parser” to read values manually.

            And before anyone asks: Yes, I’ve known people who did exactly that and to this day I’m still traumatized by that discovery.

            But yes, comments would’ve been nice.

      • TCB13@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        There’s comments in the specs and a bunch of parsers that actually inore //

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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      2 months ago
      { "key": "six",
        "value": 6,
        "comment": "6 is a bad number. Use five." }
      
        • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Yes, it’s a field. Specifically, a field containing human-readable information about what is going on in adjacent fields, much like a comment. I see no issue with putting such information in a json file.

          As for “you don’t comment by putting information in variables”: In Python, your objects have the __doc__ attribute, which is specifically used for this purpose.

      • renzev@lemmy.worldOP
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        2 months ago

        Please don’t. If you need something like json but with comments, then use YAML or TOML. Those formats are designed to be human-readable by default, json is better suited for interchanging information between different pieces of software. And if you really need comments inside JSON, then find a parser that supports // or /* */ syntax.

    • leisesprecher@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      And there are some truly magic tools.

      XSDs are far from perfect, but waaay more powerful than json schema.

      XSLT has its problems, but completely transforming a document to a completely different structure with just a bit of text is awesome. I had to rewrite a relatively simple XSLT in Java and it was something like 10 times more lines.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      People may hate on SOAP but I’ve never had issues with setting up a SOAP client

    • Codex@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I came into the industry right when XML fever had peaked as was beginning to fall back. But in MS land, it never really went away, just being slowly cannibalize by JSON.

      You’re right though, there was some cool stuff being done with xml when it was assumed that it would be the future of all data formats. Being able to apply standard tools like XLT transforms, XSS styling, schemas to validate, and XPath to search/query and you had some very powerful generic tools.

      JSON has barely caught up to that with schemes and transforms. JQ lets you query json but I don’t really find it more readable or usable than XPath. I’m sure something like XLT exists, but there’s no standardization or attempt to rally around shared tools like with XML.

      That to me is the saddest thing. VC/MBA-backed companies have driven everyone into the worst cases of NIHS ever. Now there’s no standards, no attempts to share work or unify around reliable technology. Its every company for themselves and getting other people suckered into using (and freely maintaining) your tools as a prelude to locking them into your ecosystem is the norm now.

      • clb92@feddit.dk
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        2 months ago

        Lots or file formats are just zipped XML.

        I was reverse engineering fucking around with the LBX file format for our Brother label printer’s software at work, because I wanted to generate labels programmatically, and they’re zipped XML too. Terrible format, LBX, really annoying to work with. The parser in Brother P-Touch Editor is really picky too. A string is 1 character longer or shorter than the length you defined in an attribute earlier in the XML? “I’ve never seen this file format in my life,” says P-Touch Editor.

        • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Sounds like it’s actually using XSLT or some kind of content validation. Which to be honest sounds like a good practice.

          • clb92@feddit.dk
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            2 months ago

            Here’s an example of a text object taken from the XML, if you’re curious: https://clips.clb92.xyz/2024-09-08_22-27-04_gfxTWDQt13RMnTIS.png

            EDIT: And with more complicated strings (like ones havingnumbers or symbols - just regular-ass ASCII symbols, mind you) there will be tens of <stringItem>, because apparently numbers and letters don’t even work the same. Even line breaks have their own <stringItem>. And if the number of these <stringItem> and their charLen don’t match what’s actually in pt:data, it won’t open the file.

  • SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    It’s not a waste of time… it’s a waste of space. But it does allow you to “enforce” some schema. Which, very few people use that way and so, as a data store using JSON works better.

    Or… we could go back to old school records where you store structs with certain defined lengths in a file.

    You know what? XML isn’t looking so bad now.

    If you want to break the AI ask instead what regex you should use to parse HTML.

    • leisesprecher@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      Had to work with a fixed string format years ago. Absolute hell.

      Something like 200 variables, all encoded in fixed length strings concatenated together. The output was the same.

      …and some genius before me used + instead of stringbuilders or anything dignified, so it ran about as good as lt. Dan.

      • Nithanim@programming.dev
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        2 months ago

        We slowly need to interface with an app at work that uses fixed-width too. It does not sound that bad if you hear it but it sucks to figure out where you are missing whitespace when most fields are not used and therefore all whitespace. Oh, and of course there are a lot of fields, also are aligned/formatted differently based on their type and has thin/no/wrong documentation. And I have yet to find a simple but decent “debugger”.

  • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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    2 months ago

    I’m sorry which LLM is this? What are its settings? How’d you get that out of it?

    And how did it give sources?

    • renzev@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      I’m sorry which LLM is this?

      It’s perplexity.ai. I like it because it doesn’t require an account and because it can search the internet. It’s like microsoft’s bing but slightly less cringe.

      How’d you get that out of it?

      The screenshot is fake. I used Inspect Element.

          • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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            2 months ago

            It’s a proxy for a number of LLMs of choice, prompts anonymised before they’re sent. A bit like how their search engine is anonymised Bing, or how their maps are anonymised Apple Maps. I’m happy with the service!

    • pfjarschel@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The answer is not real. The tool, on the other hand, is called Perplexity. It “understands” your question, searches the web, and gives you a summary, citing all the relevant sources.

  • AeonFelis@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    XML is good for markup. The problem is that people too often confuse “markup” and “serialization”.

    • lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 months ago

      coral by cohere

      no wait, it’s perplexity, I remember the logo.
      you can try their labs version which gives to access to latest and beefy models like llama3.1 70b