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.”
This is your confusion, not an issue with XML.
Attributes tend to be “metadata”. You ever write HTML? It’s not confusing.
Having to make a decision isn’t my primary issue here (even though it can also be problematic, when you need to serialize domain-specific data for which you’re no expert). My issue is rather in that you have to write this decision down, so that it can be used for deserializing again. This just makes XML serialization code significantly more complex than JSON serialization code. Both in terms of the code becoming harder to understand, but also just lines of code needed.
I’ve somewhat come to expect less than a handful lines of code for serializing an object from memory into a file. If you do that with XML, it will just slap everything into child nodes, which may be fine, but might also not be.
This is, without a doubt, the stupidest argument against XML I’ve ever heard. Nobody has trouble with using attributes vs. tag bodies. Nobody. There are much more credible complaints to be made about parsing performance, memory overhead, extra size, complexity when using things like namespaces, etc.
No - it is fine to just use tag bodies. You don’t need to ever use attributes if you don’t want to. You’ve never actually used XML have you?
https://www.baeldung.com/jackson-xml-serialization-and-deserialization
Okay, dude, glad to have talked.
In HTML, which things are attributes and which things are tags are part of the spec. With XML that is being used for something arbitrary, someone is making the choice every time. They might have a different opinion than you do, or even the same opinion, but make different judgments on occasion. In JSON, there are fewer choices, so fewer chances for people to be surprised by other people’s choices.
I mean, yeah. But people don’t just do things randomly. Most people put data in the body and metadata in attributes just like html.