AI's take on XML : programmerhumor

[-] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 181 points 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 51 points 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.

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[-] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 30 points 2 months ago

Strong competition from yaml and json on this point however

[-] ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de 43 points 2 months ago

JSON not supporting comments is a human rights violation

[-] frezik@midwest.social 15 points 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.

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[-] AVincentInSpace@pawb.social 33 points 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!

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[-] annoyed_onion@lemmy.world 143 points 2 months ago

I mean, it's not wrong...

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

Disagree. I prefer XML for config files where the efficiency of disk size doesn't matter at all. Layers of XML are much easier to read than layers of Json. Json is generally better where efficiency matters.

[-] Hexarei@programming.dev 17 points 2 months ago

TOML or bust

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[-] toothpaste_sandwich@feddit.nl 90 points 2 months ago

Wow, that's a very passive aggressive reaction. I enjoyed a lot.

[-] SkyNTP@lemmy.ml 46 points 2 months ago

This is what happens when stack overflow is used for training.

[-] Agent641@lemmy.world 21 points 2 months ago

Not long before AI just tells me to google it, or read the manual.

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[+] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 73 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

[deleted]

[-] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 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.

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[-] Landless2029@lemmy.world 25 points 2 months ago

That's my biggest peev about JSON actually. No comments!! WTH!

[-] nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 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.

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[-] tetris11@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

{ "key": "six",
  "value": 6,
  "comment": "6 is a bad number. Use five." }

[-] renzev@lemmy.world 17 points 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 11 points 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.

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[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 71 points 2 months ago

finally accurate ai

[-] RunningInRVA@lemmy.world 15 points 2 months ago

Except for obvious typos

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[-] gregor@gregtech.eu 70 points 2 months ago

a wate of time

[-] Batman@lemmy.world 59 points 2 months ago

A word document is xml

[-] renzev@lemmy.world 63 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

zipped xml!

[-] clb92@feddit.dk 28 points 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 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 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 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 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 , because apparently numbers and letters don't even work the same. Even line breaks have their own . And if the number of these and their charLen don't match what's actually in pt:data, it won't open the file.

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[-] LittleWizard@feddit.org 44 points 2 months ago

I hate writing xml with a passion

[-] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 31 points 2 months ago

If you are writing it then you are doing it wrong.

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[-] SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world 38 points 2 months ago* (last edited 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 11 points 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.

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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 33 points 2 months ago

wate

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.world 30 points 2 months ago

I'm starting to like this AI thing...

[-] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 24 points 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.world 60 points 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.

[-] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 18 points 2 months ago

perplexity.ai

Like DuckDuckGo's AI's, but with sources? Sounds cool, thanks!

fake

Ah... Too bad (:

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[-] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 19 points 2 months ago

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

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[-] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 17 points 2 months ago

RSS/ATOM has to be the best thing to come out of XML

[-] Tomkoid@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 months ago

BASED. What is the name of this AI? I want to use this.

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[-] flashgnash@lemm.ee 14 points 2 months ago

Listen we all know deep down the solution is to try to parse it with regex

[-] expatriado@lemmy.world 13 points 2 months ago

stuff like this is how reddit found out their users comments were being used 😂

[-] renzev@lemmy.world 27 points 2 months ago

[-] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago

It is very cool, specifically as a human readable mark down / data format.

The fact that you can make anything a tag and it's going to be valid and you can nest stuff, is amazing.

But with a niche use case.

Clearly the tags waste space if you're actually saving them all the time.

Good format to compress though...

[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago

I disagree, with a passion.

It is soooo cluttered, so much useless redundant tags everywhere. Just give JSON or YAML or anything really but XML...

But to each their own i guess.

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[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 months ago

I think we did a thread about XML before, but I have more questions. What exactly do you mean by "anything can be a tag"?

It seems to me that this:

<address>
    <street_address>21 2nd Street</street_address>
    <city>New York</city> 
    <state>NY</state>
    <postal_code>10021-3100</postal_code>
</address>

Is pretty much the same as this:

  "address": {
    "street_address": "21 2nd Street",
    "city": "New York",
    "state": "NY",
    "postal_code": "10021-3100"
  },

If it branches really quickly the XML style is easier to mentally scope than brackets, though, I'll give it that.

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