xml -- oh the pain

[michaellunsford]

Maybe this is just a rant, but what is the deal with the XML fascination lately?

 

I pass an address to Yahoo's new geocode API and it returns xml. I can't conceive of any possible reason it would need to return a latitude and longitude in xml (thee fields deep).

['ResultSet'] {
['Result'] {
	['Latitude']
	['Longitude']
}
}

Now I have to write a page of code to extract data from an xml document instead of just a simple explode(). Same story with the NOAA (although their case might be more justified). Is it just me, or is this becoming a trend? What ever happened to keep it simple?

[trq]

What ever happened to keep it simple?

 

Your kidding? XML is simple, and that is exactly the kind of task it was designed for. Are you saying you would rather a comma separated string with absolutely no description of what each field actually means?

[effigy]

XML is meant to be verbose. If it wasn't, the benefit of information exchange goes out the window and everyone devolves to passing around specialized instructions.

[michaellunsford]

I thought passing two variables through a three dimensional XML file was nuts. Maybe I was mistaken. But if I find a single variable XML file, I'm posting again