Our industry has the remarkable properties of being almost entirely newbies, a constant churn of green developers, combined with being very bad about passing down generational knowledge. This is why things that are easier to explain win out over things that are technically superior but take longer to get your head around almost every time.
The thing JSON had going for it over XML is that it maps cleanly to most languages object models so you can read the results directly. No writing XQueries or DOMs to read values.
It’s only major downfall is lack of comments, which has lead people to YAML. (There’s plenty of other things it lacks in comparison to XML, like native schemas, but most of that falls into things newbies don’t know they want)
YAML is in this weird middle place where it’s easy to explain but impossible for a human to master. It appears as simple as JSON to newcomers who adopt it, but the long time users of it find it full of foot guns. People wanted JSON with comments but instead they got the complexity of XML minus the clarity.
Of course some of the hate come from the application where XML was used, more than XML itself, but it also is a deeply flawed language.
Nowadays the main issue would be that it requires a complex generator and parser libraries to be any useful (you'll never want to deal with XML parsing/escaping by yourself) yet it's not as efficient as binary formats like protobuff for instance.
That means that anything you'll want to edit by hand or be purely textual and readble will be better done in yaml or json, and anything beyond that can be done in other ways. The need for a single language trying to awkwardly span all the spectrum isn't big.
Our industry has the remarkable properties of being almost entirely newbies, a constant churn of green developers, combined with being very bad about passing down generational knowledge. This is why things that are easier to explain win out over things that are technically superior but take longer to get your head around almost every time.
The thing JSON had going for it over XML is that it maps cleanly to most languages object models so you can read the results directly. No writing XQueries or DOMs to read values.
It’s only major downfall is lack of comments, which has lead people to YAML. (There’s plenty of other things it lacks in comparison to XML, like native schemas, but most of that falls into things newbies don’t know they want)
YAML is in this weird middle place where it’s easy to explain but impossible for a human to master. It appears as simple as JSON to newcomers who adopt it, but the long time users of it find it full of foot guns. People wanted JSON with comments but instead they got the complexity of XML minus the clarity.