A Brief Defense of XML

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • awesome-jsonschema

    A curated list of awesome JSON Schema resources, tutorials, tools, and more.

    (There is already a JSON Schema definition at https://json-schema.org/)

    Like you said - standard XML isn't terrible. Adding on an XSD isn't terrible, because now you can enforce structure and datatypes on files provided by outside parties. Creating an XSLT is much more of a mental challenge, and probably should be left to tools to define.

    Anything beyond those technologies is someone polishing up their resume.

  • learning_xslt_with_python

    A CLI and a set of examples to learn XSLT with the lxml and saxonche Python parsers.

    I think a middle ground has been reached, XSLT 3.0 allows you to transform your XML into JSON and back. The XSLT 3.0 (2017) processor is available to non-Java languages from Saxonica, for Python "pip install saxonpy" (Linux only)

    If you want to see how to do these XML-to-JSON and JSON-to-XML transforms I have written a little learning repo with a CLI: https://github.com/aleph2c/leaning_xslt

    Here is Michael Kay's white paper on Transforming JSON using XSLT 3.0: https://www.saxonica.com/papers/xmlprague-2016mhk.pdf

    Once your data is in a JSON format, you could implement your compact-binary-format idea around it.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts