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

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On 9/25/20 9:24 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):
> 
>> I suspect that most people just don’t know, and in a lot of cases,
>> those migrations won’t happen and the data will simply disappear. I
>> did email Gruber about it, because they’re using the term Markdown for
>> something that fundamentally isn’t Markdown.
> 
> IMO, it says a _lot_ about the WordPress user community that (by your
> account) WordPress gratuitously broke data export, and didn't even
> update documentation to note the change, and _yet_ the user community
> isn't registering loud complaints -- or any complaints that I can find
> -- on the global Internet.

I'm a bit surprised. I've been a drupal user and developer and I got fed 
up with the sect of some core developer and by the never settling API.
I grew up with the assumption that a large part of WP success was due to 
a smooth path of upgrade (core and modules).
In fact I think Drupal lost a big slice of market to WP exactly for this 
reason.

> I'm always wary of confirmation bias, and, as you know, my inclination
> has been to _think_ that the WordPress crowd are the same knuckle-dragging
> technophobes who also love hideous software contraptions like Drupal,
> Plone, J2EE, and Node.js -- but I try not to assume that without
> confirmatory evidence.

Drupal started with a deep idiosyncrasy against OOP but starting with 8 
it became crazy about all the buzzwords as dependency injection and what 
not. It's still full of legacy code that from my POV makes OOP 
techniques just a gimmick that often just get into the way.

But while it lost a lot of market share I think it is still second.

At least they promised they won't break the API regularly and they will 
make the upgrade path smooth.

What's sad is there seems to be no alternative in that software space.

There are tools to set up vanity sites that revolve around node.js and 
there are frameworks where you've to put in a lot of effort before you 
can setup a CMS.

I thought there should be still large demand for CMS so there should be 
some competition. And Aquia (the largest company behind Drupal) and 
especially WordPress (the company) are reasonably large companies.
So I'd expect a better quality of code.

For similar reasons I'm a bit surprised Horde (webmail, calendar, 
addressbook, ActiveSync support) that is still used by a lot of people 
selling hosting and virtual servers is struggling to evolve.

But maybe my premises are wrong.

As a side note:

xml: it offers flexibility where no one is willing to use it. It has 
Xpath that can be handy when your software/module is 
responsible/interested in just a section of a file. I think I played 
with xls transformation more than 20 years ago but they seems too 
complicated. I'm not sure if anyone is still using xml/xls this way 
unless for legacy reasons. Again Xpath can be handy and I'm not aware of 
any equivalent.

json is mostly OK. Not too different from many way to serialize data 
across many different languages but very well supported by most 
languages. Native to JavaScript. JS should die together with Flash but 
that's what we have.

yaml: less typed than json but way more fun to read and write. Solve 
most of the problems.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
https://www.webthatworks.it https://www.borgonovo.net