Unless you’re writing HTML or SVG, both siblings to XML, you probably aren’t going to see XML in too many other places. Today, it’s all but dead for data serialization purposes on the web. Originally, the XML language was amazingly flexible and easy to write, but its drawback was that it was verbose, difficult for humans to read, really difficult for computers to read, and had a lot of syntax that wasn’t entirely necessary to communicate information. In turn, other languages began popping up to deal with more specialized cases such as CSON, TOML, and YAML. Around that time, JSON was born and was able to fulfil all requirements. All three fall under the SGML specification, but are subsets with stricter rules and shorter flexibility.Įventually, people started seeing a great deal of benefit in having very small, concise, easy to read, and easy to generate data that could be shared programmatically between systems with very little overhead. It became the father of languages such as XML, SVG, and HTML.

SGML was incredibly flexible and well defined by its publishers. Facts Firstīack in the early days of the interwebs, some really smart fellows decided to put together a standard language which every system could read and creatively named it Standard Generalized Markup Language, or SGML for short. Each has benefits, cons, and appropriate use cases. Since I’m a web developer and we’re an agency who creates websites, we’ll stick to those special formats that web systems can understand, or be made to understand without much effort, and that are particularly useful for human readability: XML, JSON, TOML, CSON, and YAML. It’s difficult to have both as we humans enjoy loosely typed, flexible formatting standards that allow us to be more expressive, whereas machines tend to enjoy being told exactly what everything is without doubt or lack of detail, and consider “strict specifications” to be their favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry’s. and simplicity for machines to read and write.simplicity for humans to read and write,.While there are enough data serialization formats out there to bury the Burj Khalifa, they all mostly fall into two categories: For those who aren’t savvy on the super buzzword I just threw at you, data serialization is the process of taking some information from one system, churning it into a format that other systems can read, and then passing it along to those other systems. One not-so-convoluted way and a favorite among the developer community is through data serialization. However, that last bit, writing code that writes code for other code to read, can get more convoluted than this paragraph-quickly. It’s all very mumbo-jumbo, but beautiful in its own way. I write code that writes code for other code to read. A Super Serious Segment About Sets, Subsets, and Supersets of Sample Serialization

The good parts by douglas crockford