There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. “Oh, XML,” they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. “We use JSON now. Much cleaner.”
IMHO one of the fundamental problems with XML for data serialization is illustrated in the article:
The same data can be portrayed in two different ways. Whenever you serialize or deserialize data, you need to decide whether to read/write values from/to child nodes or attributes.
That’s because XML is a markup language. It’s great for typing up documents, e.g. to describe a user interface. It was not designed for taking programmatic data and serializing that out.
This is your confusion, not an issue with XML.
Attributes tend to be “metadata”. You ever write HTML? It’s not confusing.
JSON also has arrays. In XML the practice to approximate arrays is to put the index as an attribute. It’s incredibly gross.
I don’t think I’ve seen that much if ever.
Typically, XML repeats tag names. Repeating keys are not possible in JSON, but are possible in XML.
<items> <item></item> <item></item> <item></item> </items>That’s correct, but the order of tags in XML is not meaningful, and if you parse then write that, it can change order according to the spec. Hence, what you put would be something like the following if it was intended to represent an array.
<items> <item index="1"></item> <item index="2"></item> <item index="3"></item> </items>And that is issue why? The specification decided which one you use and what do you need. For some things you consider things as attributes and for some things they are child elements.
JSON doesn’t even have attributes.