Re: [OAUTH-WG] [apps-discuss] Web Finger vs. Simple Web Discovery (SWD)

[Michael Thomas <[e-mail]>]

On 04/20/2012 08:31 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> On 2012-04-20 17:12, Michael Thomas wrote:
>> ...
>> To Paul's point about how easy it is for a server to support both, I'd
>> retort that it's equally easy for a client to gin up JSON instead of XML.
>> Pity the poor programmer who can't get their head around that gigantic
>> change. On the other hand, having to support XML and JSON is an ongoing
>> maintenance headache server-side. Why do it? There isn't even the dubious
>> religious war like back in the day saying that binary encoded ASN.1 was
>> "better/faster/stacks and cleans dishes" than "human readable" XML. XML
>> is just a clunky and past its prime text encoding at this point.
>> Requiring it
>> smacks of nostalgia to me.
>> ...
>
> What's sure is that with generalizations like these, you're not going to convince anybody.
>
> JSON is simpler than XML. Sometimes it's too simple.
>
> In my experience, testing HTTP interfaces that return XML is more pleasant as a browser will actually *display* the response (and allow it to be transformed to HTML client-side), while it will pop up a download dialogue for application/json. Maybe it's time to fix the latter?
>

It may be a generalization, but it's based on direct experience. I create and use
JSON for fairly complex data structures transferred server->client (it's a ski tracking
app) and I have never once thought "gosh, I wish that I had the expressiveness
of XML here". On the input side of uploading points to the server, I use a home
grown XML scheme purely for my own historical reasons and I do often wish that
I could get rid of it. The worst of all possible worlds would be to require support
for both on the input and output side. Bletch. Just the testing requirements
would be onerous.

I also know that, oh say, twitter supports XML and JSON in their API. Probably
lots of companies do. I'll bet if you asked them now, they'd say they wish they
hadn't supported XML at this point because it's nothing more than overhead,
keeping some dev and devtest folks gainfully employed.

Mike, and I don't have a problem viewing JSON in a browser