XSF Discussion - 2021-07-06


  1. 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].

  2. mathieui

    Do we really want to take time to address uninformed comments from 10 years ago?

  3. 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"

  4. ConcernedPerson

    Point.

  5. ConcernedPerson

    What about article about XML?

  6. 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)

  7. mathieui

    (and I do not even like XML myself)

  8. 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

  9. Daniel

    You are going to abstract them behind some serialization layer and never think about it again

  10. Holger

    Ah we should learn from IRC.

  11. Holger

    Wouldn't take much to cover everything XMPP does.

  12. Holger

    Yeah.

  13. 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.

  14. 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

  15. Daniel

    In fact I found jmap (JSON based) to be more irregular and needing more custom adapters /special conditions

  16. moparisthebest

    Typed maybe, parsed not so much

  17. 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

  18. moparisthebest

    XMPP has it's problems, XML isn't one of them

  19. mathieui

    (but then why would you do that)

  20. Holger

    mathieui, absolutely 🙂

  21. moparisthebest

    But your minimal XMPP client will be correct and handle edge cases, your minimal IRC client will not

  22. mathieui

    A friend started writing an OCaml XMPP library and it was a bit too much to take in when starting

  23. ConcernedPerson

    Hmm. Could XMPP be re-written in JSON?

  24. Daniel

    But why?

  25. Daniel

    If you read any of the previous responses

  26. ConcernedPerson

    Daniel: +1 regarding jmap.

  27. ConcernedPerson

    s/JSON/LISP

  28. ConcernedPerson

    Specifically Scheme dialect of LISP. Very extensible and good use in XMPP.

  29. ConcernedPerson

    *would be good use

  30. Link Mauve

    ConcernedPerson, what are you missing wrt extensibility in XML?

  31. ConcernedPerson

    Link Mauve: All these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)#Distinguishing_features) and EDSL (Embedded Domain Specific Language).

  32. moparisthebest

    Why don't we just send bits of JavaScript for people to execute instead?

  33. 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.

  34. moparisthebest

    Then anyone can make a client using electron in a few minutes

  35. Zash

    Good idea, let's bring back the XMPP over HTTP JSONP polling method!

  36. 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.

  37. ConcernedPerson

    Link Mauve: Oh. I was thinking about Macros and embedded domain-specific languages, or EDSLs.

  38. 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.

  39. ConcernedPerson

    Sam: Pardon me. I just got side tracked.

  40. deuill

    Simply because XML has an additional dimension in attributes that is not expressible as a tree.

  41. ConcernedPerson

    * side-tracked with languages.

  42. moparisthebest

    jonas’: looking forward to your fat32 xmpp bot https://github.com/8051Enthusiast/regex2fat

  43. jonas’

    I think I saw that one already

  44. moparisthebest

    You can't unsee something like that