Entries published on December 21, 2006
I can’t believe it’s not XML!
As you may or may not have heard, JSON came to Dave Winer’s attention today. He is, quite obviously, of the opinion that this is just a reinvention of what people are already doing just fine with XML, thank you very much, so what’s the point?
Of course, this ignores the fact that the Lisp folks have been making the same argument for years, wondering why there was this great pressing need to go out and invent XML when s-expressions were just dandy.
But once you get past the egos and the attachments to this or that language or tool, the XML/s-expressions debate basically comes down to XML people saying, “OK, you’ve got s-expressions, and they’re pretty cool and they solve your problems. But they don’t solve my problems, so I need something else.”
Not coincidentally, once you get past the egos and the attachments to this or …