@lettosprey
It's OK, we've got JSON now.

Oh, JSON column data format? We're fscked.

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/json.html

@lettosprey I remember those times. You need IIS & sql talking to each other, new clunky syntax, clunky xml client parsers and an imaginary situation where you'd exchange data between organizations & if you didn't cross org boundaries, you were supposed to use less painful pre-xml data structures.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2002/january/sql-server-2000-and-xml-developing-xml-enabled-data-solutions-for-the-web

@lettosprey

Many years ago my boss saw the "RSS" button everywhere, so he ask me to add it.

When it was done, he looks at it and ask me to change the design of the page xD

@lettosprey tale as old as time

@lettosprey I have to deal with XML data columns in SQL Server daily because when Microsoft was advising my company a couple of decades ago before I worked there, they were pushing XML columns as the wonder solution to everything.

@lettosprey When teaching web design at a business school circa 2005 I had a career-change student who had been building enterprise Java apps that were all about processing XML. When I showed him that you could make a web page just by typing tags and text into a file... mind blown.

@lettosprey You make fun but the founders of the company I’m at now took this exact decision (in 2007) and we’re still paying the cost decades later. Apparently they’d been burned by Oracle at their previous company 🤯🤯

@lettosprey

Managers happen to a lot of things.

A LOT of things.

@lettosprey @cstross Yes—I had to do exactly that in the late 2000s! For several years, our freelancer team created Flash microsites for Landrover’s annual Live Rallye, crunching daily images, videos, and diary entries transmitted per satellite from the Malaysian jungle and similar. And during my very first call with Landrover’s UK IT department, I was told that, for security reasons, we couldn’t use a data base! That’s how I came to create an #XML backend as a stand-in for SQL.

Fun times!

@lettosprey Sums it up. XD

@lettosprey

can confirm

@lettosprey it also took a minute for people to figure out what is was actually good for, and fit it into their regular toolkit, like all the other specs...

Funny to read this now while I'm working on an XML schema for database queries in one system I'm developing (to be translated into SQL down the line).

@lettosprey I found myself saying exactly this to some colleagues at an ‘AI’ event a couple of weeks ago.

@lettosprey "XML ✌️data islands✌️"

@lettosprey my _favorite_ xml documents were real estate documents for distribution that included a single field: unstructured `csv` rows.

@lettosprey thinking back on all the times the CIO read the latest issue of CIO magazine and then demanded the tech stack of the month...

@lettosprey 😳 🙀 🥺 😭

@lettosprey Has been interesting to watch science adopt, and then drop, XML as a format. At the moment, if you want data exchange it will come as a CSV file, with the first line containing the variable names of the columns. Mostly driven by the lack of fuss in reading the file on whatever system you use.

@lettosprey that’s a pretty interesting perspective on the quality we can expect from AI.

To this day, the xslt libraries for Java (the most widespread enterprise language) only work partially. While you can solve most problems with time, better avoid trusting the documentation, if you need to change XML directly.

@lettosprey
There was, for a little while, a movement to translate knitting instructions into something like XML.

@lettosprey It felt like this already, thank you for the anecdote.

I did comparemthe corporate push to the idea of doing everything in Excel already, but I’ve not seen this with my own eyes.

@lettosprey I saw this post by accident as I had blocked AI from my timeline pretty much because of what you discribe so well!

@lettosprey remember the old saying .. XML is like violence .. if it doesn't solve your problem you aren't using enough of it ... also mostly true these days ...

@lettosprey @ArneBab

XML is dead! JSON is the new XML. Orange is the new Black. Slavery is FREEDOM!!!!

@lettosprey Another one to add to the Venn Diagram of *"Actually just a very slow database"*s... 😹

@lettosprey I worked once on a presentation app that read it's data (categories, details) from an exported directory structure riddled with XML files to describe the contents. This was read before by an obsolete Flash app that did the same.

NONE of the XML files was good. It took several recursive regex operations on all the files to just fix the syntax, the encoding hell and some stupid corner cases, find duplicates and so on.

And all the time I wondered how the Flash app did the same before.

@lettosprey this is exactly the attitude I would expect from someone who isn't alpha sigma black belt XML certified

@lettosprey about 2010 I worked for a supply chain company that had issues integrating data provided by multiple upstream suppliers

A consultant: "But they are switching to XML, so if they all give you XML and your system imports XML it will all just work"

Me: "...it doesn't work like that"

Them: "eh?"

1/2

@lettosprey The current iteration of "your company needs to be using blockchain!"

@lettosprey well, you don’t need the managers to have developers use shiny new tech in their products

@lettosprey
The red flag I hear is management asking about what's possible.

It's possible to make a computer out of a series of rats in cages, trained to push a lever on command.

It's possible to run your business on TempleOS (which is totally immune to viruses).

@lettosprey i know it's bad but i like xml and once made a html alternative with it…

@lettosprey

Several old Devs gathered around a poorly lit table in a run down bar near the edge of the Wastelands.

With a voice that speaks of the scars of long fought battles one Dev breaks the silence: "There were... programming languages written in XML. You had things like <If condition="something"> ... </if>"

The Dev begins to sob and retract into a fetal position as they mumble something about function returns and binary interface layers. The rest just pour themselves another round.

@lettosprey "Perhaps if we used XML to specify our LLM..."
(or maybe I 've seen one XKCD tagnote too many.)

@lettosprey There's one of these every few years; other notable hits include 4GLs and The Almighty Blockchain. And AI another few times, actually.