I mean, XML is better if you have more text and fewer tags. And JSON is better if you have more tags and less text. Argh! I mean, come on, it’s that easy. But you know, there’s a big debate about it. [Steve Yegge, via Simon Wilison]

I’ve been asking that question in interviews, and I don’t think there’s still a big debate about when to use XML and when to use JSON. It’s now settled.

And Yegge’s answer is not quite right. I think the difference is between structural markup and key/value pairs.

However, there are also cases when you should prefer text/plain over JSON. A hint: every object in a Second Life sim might have an HTTP engine running in it.

As I’ve mentioned previously, XML Catalogs matter.
]]> http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28RSS2%29&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whump.com%2FmoreLikeThis%2F&seed_title=That+URI+you+keep+using%26%238230%3B/feed/ 0 http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28RSS2%29&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whump.com%2FmoreLikeThis%2F2007%2F11%2F15%2Fleopard-feeds-yay%2F&seed_title=Leopard+Feeds+Yay%21 http://www.whump.com/feeder/?FeederAction=clicked&feed=Articles+%28RSS2%29&seed=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whump.com%2FmoreLikeThis%2F2007%2F11%2F15%2Fleopard-feeds-yay%2F&seed_title=Leopard+Feeds+Yay%21#comments Fri, 16 Nov 2007 05:41:52 +0000 Bill Humphries http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/2007/11/15/leopard-feeds-yay/ A happy discovery this morning in Safari 3:

Click on the poorly named ‘RSS’ button in the address bar and get a list of all the feeds available at the current URL.

Torley, we need to talk about upgrading you to WordPress 2.3.

Cynthia and I have tickets for the Nozomi Shinkansen to Hiroshima tomorrow morning at 7. The typhoon’s track cuts across the main bullet train route, so our trip may be delayed.

Right now we have heavy rain and wind, and many blown-out umbrellas at Ueno Station down the street from our hotel.

Japan’s National Institute of Informatics has a visualization of current and previous storms incorporating satellite images, other data sources, and reports posted to weblogs and emailed from ketai (mobile phones.)

The NII also publishes an Atom feed of typhoon reports.

Last week, Netscape temporarily removed the DTD for RSS 0.91 from their site, and things promptly went south.

In response to that mess, Henri Sivonen points out that if you’re sending XML (not HTML) over the wire, there’s no reason to attach a Doctype declaration, and consuming applications should use internal Catalogs if they want to validate what they get over the wire.

I echo Sivonen’s reminder that you should declare a DTD when sending HTML, since browsers know to either ignore it or use a local version of the DTD.

Sivonen also mentions, in passing, the Billion Laughs attack. Which, to my shame, I’d missed.

But here’s hoping no one takes JSON seriously as a general-purpose data interchange format. We already have one of those. And it’s better. And it has TONS of great tools and ubiquitous platform support built around it.

Too late. According to Mark Nottingham, Robert Cerny’s proposed a schema language for JSON.

eval('(' + request.responseText + ')'); is pretty easy for a VB programmer (or a deadline driven UI programmer like me) to wrap their head around.

Round trip.

ETA: there’s an updated version that runs on PHP 4.4.x.

ETA 2: And it works, too. I just tried it with Tim Bray’s APE.

And congratulations to the Torres’ on the occasion of the birth of their third child (Elias should confer with Tim and Lauren on the logistics of open source development while taking care of an infant.)

In order to use that with PHP 4, apply Niklas’ patch.

Finally, if you don’t want to syndicate your feed’s content as escaped HTML, apply my patch that combines my changes and Niklas’ to James’ code. However, you’re now responsible for making sure your entries are valid XHTML.

Note: after applying the patch, you’ll need to modify the format string passed to the_time to account for your offset from GMT. There’s probably another way to do this.