this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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There exists a peculiar amnesia in software engineering regarding XML. Mention it in most circles and you will receive knowing smiles, dismissive waves, the sort of patronizing acknowledgment reserved for technologies deemed passé. "Oh, XML," they say, as if the very syllables carry the weight of obsolescence. "We use JSON now. Much cleaner."

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[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Except config files. Please don't do config files in json.

[–] abbadon420@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 week ago

Fuck yaml. TOML or literally anything else.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why not? It works great in Python.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not on the human parser side.

[–] Tanoh@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And no comments, unless you use a non-standard parser. But then you might as well use anorher format.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)
{"comment": "Who says you can't do comments in JSON?"}
[–] tyler@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)
{"comment2": "I can do this all day."}
[–] tyler@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago

Now put a newline in your comment, to make it readable. Clearly you can see the problem here right? “comment2” isn’t a comment. It’s a key with a value. Numbering them doesn’t actually fix anything, in fact it makes it much much harder to maintain.

[–] abbadon420@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago

Lol. That works, but its hacky.

The meaning of a "comment" is an integrated language feauture to write something that is not parsed by that language. This is just regular JSON.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 week ago

This only works if the software that consumes the JSON doesn’t validate it or ignores keys it doesn’t recognize (which is bad, IMHO).

[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

JSON is super easy to read and write though. Just needs a parser that allows comments...

[–] tyler@programming.dev 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 days ago

Yes, which needs to be supported by your parser.

[–] neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works -1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Json configs read much cleaner to me since .net swapped to them a while back.

Xml is incredibly verbose when there's a 12k loc web.config.xml

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Then do a cfg or ini style config or make multiple config files. YAML/TOML if you can't make it simpler. The neccessity for complex config formats is a fuckup of the dev.

[–] neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Or you work in an environment that's still using Full Framework and ASP.NET Webforms.

These places exist, and they are unfortunately not rare.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Heh, thank you. It's usually not so bad, but figuring our all the assembly redirects needed is always a nightmare job.

Can't wait until this this is on .net 8+ and we can use clean configs.