L' Eomot Inversé (1/27/2012)
sknox (1/27/2012)
It's the unrelenting insistence of some to express every property in XML as an element that leads to XML being widely considered a waste of space and difficult to read. It doesn't have to be either.Well, yes, it is nonsense to insist that attributes should be expressed as singleton elements. And the space and processing saved by not doing so is valuable.
But even XML without that pointless extra verbosity is difficult to read and wastes time. (Yes, I'm an XML-hater; or rather someone who hates to see XML used for something for which it is utterly inappropriate, which happens often enough to make me inclined to hate first and looks and see if it was justified afterwards.
I certainly agree that XML is often used for things that it's not designed for.
I don't know about "difficult to read", though. I'd much rather read a well-formatted* XML document than what passes for a data dictionary in many shops nowadays.
*and since any well-formed XML document can easily be translated into a well-formatted one by many tools out there (IE if you have nothing else), if you don't have well-formatted XML, you don't really have XML.