I’m curious, I’ve been developing pretty powerful websites/web apps, and I’ve never learned XML, even odder I’ve never really felt the need to. It’s not like curl or Prepared Statements where, before knowing what they did and how they worked, I had a feeling ‘there’s got to be an easier way to do this!’ or ‘there’s got to be something designed for this!’.
Currently I work with MySQL and JSON and I don’t have this feeling of ‘I need to learn that’ (XML), this must be wrong!
I’m really interested to hear some compelling arguments for XML, and learn about things which it can do beter than JSON or MySQL (or some other aspect of web dev) and when i should be using it!
JSON is very lightweight which makes it better suited for passing data around to the front end.
XML has descriptive tags that (I personally find) make it easier to read in a raw format.
If I wanted to have any sort of settings file that is loaded in from my program, i would have it in an XML file format.
That’s my idea of it anyway, but i’m sure there are much more in-depth reasons for choosing one over the other. Of which i am not experienced enough to list 🙂
However i did find a couple of sites that make some good points.
http://ajaxian.com/archives/json-vs-xml-the-debate (Some good points in the comments)
http://webignition.net/articles/xml-vs-yaml-vs-json-a-study-to-find-answers/