Perhaps true. It is used in a load of places where it's overkill. It's effectively a data structure with an extra 'dimension' at each level - a node has:

XML is about the only way you can easily do all three at once, but ... how often is this necessary? XHTML type documents is perhaps the example I can think of - and that's a pretty big use case - but actually most uses the looser HTML spec rather than XML. (Major difference is - XML is much stricter about tags, ordering/closing/nesting). That's why I think XML is here to stay, but would generally agree with your assertion - most use cases I've seen it JSON is the better choice for data object transfer (API) and YAML for flat file (config).

But either way - once you have things like xpath and 'directory style' navigation (parent/child/sibling) of your XML doc, it is a lot saner. Certainly more so than trying to flatten part of it's dimensionality into a less complicated data structure like the perl native ones.

In reply to Re^2: XML::Simple needs to go! by Preceptor
in thread XML::Simple needs to go! by Preceptor

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