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The Search for Simplicity

May 19, 2010 14:44:41.000

Dave Winer hits on something interesting here - in a post about the ongoing move past XML:

This is why I find the arguments of the JSON-only proponents either lazy or dishonest. I don't know which it is. They say that XML is too complicated, but that's wrong. Just ignore everything but elements, attributes and namespaces.

You need to read the whole thing to get the context, but - to summarize - Dave laments the way XML has been deemed as "too complex", and uses XMPP as an example of that. I thought about doing something with XMPP once, but after looking at it, decided against. I wanted to leave some time in my life for other pursuits, like eating and sleeping :)

Here's the thing though - over time, the architecture astronauts grab all emergent technologies. They got their hands on XML, and ended up getting lost in the weeds (I still subscribe to the Atom mailing list - you should see what level of minutiae gets discussed there these days).

Fear not though - JSON may be simple now, but once the astronauts are done with it, someone will have to invent yet another simple text transport scheme. It seems to be the way things happen in this industry.

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posted by James Robertson

Comments

Re: The Search for Simplicity

[Malbs] May 21, 2010 2:44:09.926

I've been meaning to write a satirical article about a JSON 2.0 spec, which introduces a whole lot of additional markup to JSON, which effectively makes it so cruddy to be useless.

I didn't do it because I'm actually scared someone is working on a real JSON 2.0 spec. =\

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