On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@sun.com> wrote:

On May 12, 2009, at 7:17 AM, Chris Webb wrote:

A KEY VALUE parser is trivial to write.

A JSON parser is fairly easy to write.

An XML/Atom parser is a major undertaking.

Those look like different amounts of code to me.

I don't buy this argument. All of these parsers are routinely available to programmers in popular programming languages. -Tim

I've certainly never written a parser where one was available, except for some ASN.1 stuff where the key information I needed to extract from certificates was concealed in the usual APIs. As I explained to someone who privately suggested ASN.1 as an alternative for OCCI, I'd rather remove my own testicles with a rusty spoon than do that again.

For XML we have native support in any language that matters. Even for Atom[Pub] we have native support in Microsoft's libraries and a full blown Apache Software Foundation project dedicated to the topic for Java. That's good enough for pretty much everyone - in the worst case for the most secure sites they'd end up making sense of Atom themselves using approved XML libraries.

For JSON it's a lot less clear (at least for the famous enterprise users) due to the support, copyright, patent, etc. status surrounding third-party implementations. I know at least some of my clients have policies that would require developers to write the parser themselves - granted not a particularly difficult task but an unnecessary and error prone one.

Sam