[conspire] XML Considered Harmful (was: Acronym expansion, taking pity on the general reader)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):

> Apologies for not getting back to the email. I had been meaning to,
> but I have been trying to move my site and have discovered that, to my
> horror, WordPress “upgraded” the “save as plain text” Markdown entries
> I’d been carefully generating for years so I could migrate off WP if I
> wanted to (and I do).
[...]
> WP fucking HTML/XMLified supposed text entries in a way that can’t
> easily be undone without a fucking JavaScript app to unfuxxor it, and
> that broke another app I contribute to (that has a Node app as a
> feeder piece).
> 
> Worse, the entire database historically was upgraded, and far enough
> back there’s just no point in trying to dig back that far.

To interpret (most of) this, for readers:  WordPress's documentation
states that its database records store site content in Markdown
rich-text format, a human-friendly form of markup.  This has
historically been true -- but at some point in the recent past,
WordPress suddenly changed the internal storage from Markdown to XML,
and did so even retroactively, converting the site contents of all
WordPress sites to XML -- even though the WordPress documentation
continues to claim that it stores site contents in Markdown.

This is appallingly irresponsible behaviour on the developers' part, and
has shot in the foot Deirdre along with doubtless many other WordPress
users who had been relying on Markdown and on continued access to site
contents (and on the migratability it enables).

Above is according to Deirdre's comments in person to me.  It seems like
a really weird thing for the developers to do, and, oddly, I'm not
seeing outraged comments about this all over the Web, so I'm not sure
the narrative is complete, though I'm sure it accurately describes the
vexing problem Deirdre encountered that ate her afternoon and evening.

At the risk of being annoyingly glib, personally I avoid WordPress
problems by avoiding WordPress.  But, yeah, I'd be furious about a
sudden disappearance of data access in a reasonable format and
substitution of friggin' XML, too.  I'd be reaching for /bin/rm .

Bonus reading:
https://hystericalraisins.net/xml-considered-harmful-or-arghdiediedie-681ae8752ee4

  Briefly: XML has too much structure where it doesn’t help, and not
  enough where it matters.

  Not good for humans

  The main problem is, of course, that XML was never intended for humans.
  It’s not designed so that we can efficiently write it, read it,
  understand it at a glance, or maintain it.  But many tools that use XML
  today tend to forget that, leading to hours of wasted time and lots of
  frustration.  (XML for configuration files, anyone?  Zope’s ZCML and
  .Net’s configs and all those Java frameworks?)

  Then, of course, that’s not XML’s fault; it was never designed to
  succeed at that task.  The fault lies with developers who misuse it.
  Well, yes and no.  The reason people misuse it is because it’s overhyped;
  XML is the new peanut butter (or garlic butter, according to Pete
  Abrams) — adding it to anything makes it taste better and sell more. 
  (I don’t even like peanut butter.)

  Not good for machines

  What it _was_ designed for is communication between programs; a
  unified, extensible format for data transmission.  By having libraries
  to handle it in most languages and environments, you’d make it easy for
  developers to deal with it, and as a consequence, to make their programs
  communicate.  However, after roughly ten years of working with it, it is
  my informed opinion that XML fails at that, too.
  [...]


The author would prefer a modified form of JSON.  Personally, I think 
shooting all the JavaScript coders would be a better way of solving
the problem at its source.  ;->