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ConcernedPerson
Hey all. What are your thoughts on this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810) and this (https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/)? [Genuinely Asking].
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mathieui
Do we really want to take time to address uninformed comments from 10 years ago?
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mathieui
I mean, that person does not offer any source or proof to any of their claims, it is "IM is simple, XMPP is bad, trust me"
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ConcernedPerson
Point.
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ConcernedPerson
What about article about XML?
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mathieui
it’s not an article, it is a collection of citations from cat-v, which is the home of bad opinionated takes on the internet (right after hacker news, though)
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mathieui
(and I do not even like XML myself)
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Daniel
As someone who has implemented both fairly complex xml based protocols and JSON protocols I can say that it doesn't matter. You are not going to hand craft either
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Daniel
You are going to abstract them behind some serialization layer and never think about it again
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Holger
Ah we should learn from IRC.
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Holger
Wouldn't take much to cover everything XMPP does.
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Holger
Yeah.
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Holger
And can easily be typed by a human on a telnet prompt. kk family, ditch this Conversations crap, got a new app for you, telnet.
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mathieui
What Daniel said. Writing any kind of complex data structure by hand is not what you want, so the format imports little. XML has amenities for representing it, which can be a pretty deep rabbit hole, whereas with other formats you have to reinvent the wheel
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Daniel
In fact I found jmap (JSON based) to be more irregular and needing more custom adapters /special conditions
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moparisthebest
Typed maybe, parsed not so much
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mathieui
Holger, though there is a point with which I agree with, that is getting a very minimal XMPP client up and running without a library is much harder than getting a very minimal IRC client
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moparisthebest
XMPP has it's problems, XML isn't one of them
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mathieui
(but then why would you do that)
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Holger
mathieui, absolutely 🙂
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moparisthebest
But your minimal XMPP client will be correct and handle edge cases, your minimal IRC client will not
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mathieui
A friend started writing an OCaml XMPP library and it was a bit too much to take in when starting
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ConcernedPerson
Hmm. Could XMPP be re-written in JSON?
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Daniel
But why?
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Daniel
If you read any of the previous responses
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ConcernedPerson
Daniel: +1 regarding jmap.
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ConcernedPerson
s/JSON/LISP
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ConcernedPerson
Specifically Scheme dialect of LISP. Very extensible and good use in XMPP.
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ConcernedPerson
*would be good use
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Link Mauve
ConcernedPerson, what are you missing wrt extensibility in XML?
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ConcernedPerson
Link Mauve: All these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)#Distinguishing_features) and EDSL (Embedded Domain Specific Language).
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moparisthebest
Why don't we just send bits of JavaScript for people to execute instead?
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Link Mauve
ConcernedPerson, I know Scheme, but which of these features are you missing in XML? You mentioned extensibility, that’s like the very first letter of XML.
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moparisthebest
Then anyone can make a client using electron in a few minutes
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Zash
Good idea, let's bring back the XMPP over HTTP JSONP polling method!
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Sam
Okay, the fact that this person now wants to use sexpressions and a specific dialect of Lisp even though that's a language probably means they're trolling, but on the offchance that they're not the fact that we jump to "what feature is missing" is a good illustration of their point. Why would that be the problem? That's never the problem with XML extensibility, quite the opposite.
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ConcernedPerson
Link Mauve: Oh. I was thinking about Macros and embedded domain-specific languages, or EDSLs.
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deuill
There's also a sense that people don't realize that JSON and XML aren't directly comparable, even in their simplest forms -- there's things you can express in XML that you cannot in JSON.
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ConcernedPerson
Sam: Pardon me. I just got side tracked.
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deuill
Simply because XML has an additional dimension in attributes that is not expressible as a tree.
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ConcernedPerson
* side-tracked with languages.
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moparisthebest
jonas’: looking forward to your fat32 xmpp bot https://github.com/8051Enthusiast/regex2fat
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jonas’
I think I saw that one already
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moparisthebest
You can't unsee something like that