[RadiozRadioz]

> a contrast between Claude’s modern approach [...] XML, a technology dating back to 1998

Are we really at the point where some people see XML as a spooky old technology? The phrasing dotted around this article makes me feel that way. I find this quite strange.

[coldtea]

XML has been "spooky old technology" for over a decade now. It's heyday was something like 2002.

Nobody dares advertise the XML capabilities of their product (which back then everybody did), nobody considers it either hot new thing (like back then) or mature - just obsolete enterprise shit.

It's about as popular now as J2EE, except to people that think "10 years ago" means 1999.

[rhdunn]

XML is used a lot in standards and publishing industries -- JATS, EPUB, ODF, DOCX/XLSX/..., DocBook, etc. are all XML based/use XML.

[girvo]

I kind of miss SOAP. Ahead of its time? Probably not, but I built some cool things on top of it

[fc417fc802]

It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done? I don't think anyone who considers it obsolete has an informed opinion on the matter.

Typically a more primitive (sorry, minimal) format such as JSON is sufficient in which case there's no excuse to overcomplicate things. But sometimes JSON isn't sufficient and people start inventing half baked solutions such as JSON-LD for what is already a solved problem with a mature tech stack.

XSLT remains an elegant and underused solution. Guile even includes built in XML facilities named SXML.

[vlovich123]

For me, even when it was first released, I considered obsolete enterprise shit. That view has not diminished as the sorry state of performance and security in that space has just reaffirmed that perception.

[cyanydeez]

20 years old means 1980!

[eduction]

Obsolete enterprise shit I guess includes podcasting. Impressive for the enterprise.

I’d be very curious what lasting open formats JSON has been used to build.

[himata4113]

didn't know html was spooky tech, TIL. /s

[oytis]

XML is still around, but I don't think many people would choose it as a serialization format today for something new.

[dathanb82]

The use of XML as a data serialization format was always a bad choice. It was designed as a document _markup_ language (it’s in the name), which is exactly the way it’s being used for Claude, and is actually a good use case.

[siva7]

I tried following the best practice to use XML tags and the difference was not observable. I honestly believe Anthropic forgot to remove that part of the documentation from Sonnet 3.x days and now people are still writing blogs about this secret sauce

[WD-42]

XML is back, everyone is rediscovering the terminal. Soon we’ll discover that object oriented programming is good again.

[hbarka]

If you think XML is old tech, wait until you hear of EDI, still powering Walmart and Amazon logistics. XML came in like a wrecking ball with its self-documenting promise designed to replace that cryptic pesky payload called EDI. XML promised to solve world hunger. It spawned SOAP, XML over RPC, DOM, DTD, the heyday was beautiful and Microsoft was leading the charge. C# was also right around this time. Consulting firms were bloomed charged with delivering the asynchronous revolution, the loosely coupled messaging promises of XML. I think it succeeded and it’s now quietly in the halls of warehouse having a beer or two with its older cousin the Electronic Data Interchange aka EDI.

[actionfromafar]

EDI is XML now.

[shams93]

It has a number of security issues which have not been fixed which could be used for really interesting exploitation.

[phlakaton]

I don't think anybody's proposing to throw recursive entity definitions at Claude. Just a little light informally-defined angle-bracket markup.

[theowaway213456]

The evidence suggests that XML was never that popular though for the general audience, you have to admit.

For Web markup, as an industry we tried XHTML (HTML that was strictly XML) for a while, and that didn't stick, and now we have HTML5 which is much more lenient as it doesn't even require closing tags in some cases.

For data exchange, people vastly prefer JSON as an exchange format for its simplicity, or protobuf and friends for their efficiency.

As a configuration format, it has been vastly overtaken by YAML, TOML, and INI, due to their content-forward syntax.

Having said all this I know there are some popular tools that use XML like ClickHouse, Apple's launchd, ROS, etc. but these are relatively niche compared to (e.g.) HTML

[icermann]

MS Office and Open-/LibreOffice are using zipped xml files (e.g. .docx, .xlsx and .odt). Svg vector graphics is xml, the x in ajax stands for xml (although replaced by json by now). SOAP (probably counts as the predecessor of REST) is xml-based.

XML was definitely popular in the "well used" sense. How popular it was in the "well liked" sense can maybe be up for debate, but it was the best tool for the job at the time for alot of use cases.

[intrasight]

Yup. Kids these days...