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0 pointspen2l10y ago0 comments

> In all likelihood, we're probably just lucky Igor didn't go with XML.

Okay I'll bite, what's wrong with writing nginx to go with XML?

XML is easily translatable to JSON, so... there's that.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

herge10y ago· 3 in thread

> XML is easily translatable to JSON

Not really. XML is a document markup language, where order is important. JSON is a serialization format, and is a bit more bare-boned. For example, how would you transfer this XML to json, and back to XML?

    <foo bar="baz"><bork>foo1</bork><bork>foo2</bork></foo>

skissane10y ago

There are many ways to do it, you just need to pick a convention. For example, one convention is that you use "#" as key for element name, "." as key for element children, and attribute name as keys for the attributes. Following those conventions, you can produce:

    {
        "#" = "foo",
        "bar" = "baz",
        "." = [
            { "#" = "bork", "." = "foo1" },
            { "#" = "bork", "." = "foo2" }
        ]
    }

Or, for something more verbose (but maybe more intelligible), you could use "$element" as key for element names, and "$children" as key for child elements / text. (The point of choosing $ as a prefix, is it is not a valid character in attribute names, so cannot conflict with them.)

Zikes10y ago

That is pretty hard for a human to parse and understand, though.

I think it could be reasonably easy to come up with a config file standard in XML or JSON, but that the format will have to rely on the strengths of each. Translating between the two just becomes an unreadable mess. If anything, if I were to write an application that allowed for either format, I would come up with a separate standard for each. More code/upkeep, but when the config files are intended for humans and to be hand-written, the focus should be on the user.

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librvf10y ago

> There are many ways to do it, you just need to pick a convention.

The fact that you have to pick a convention is the crux of the issue. "Easy" is a subjective term, but the fact is there isn't a direct mapping between XML And JSON.

It means that if you're using XML and converting it into a programming data structure, you have to make a bunch of decisions about how to handle the XML. It means that if you're converting a programming data structure to XML, you have to have a bunch of specific rules for how to generate that XML.

With JSON, you only have to make those decisions if you need to use data structures that aren't supported by JSON.

knieveltech10y ago

XML is largely human-unreadable, ludicrously verbose, and has weird character escape requirements. Not a trifecta I want from my config files. I don't think anyone who's ever found themselves tampering with a complex XML file in vim ever wanted to repeat the experience.

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