The Sins of XML

time to read 2 min | 207 words

In case you didn't notice, I don't like XML. To be rather exact, I don't like the way XML is used. If you are writing a document, it is a great way to skip parsing headaches, but seriously, is writing a parser that hard?

Case in point, SSIS packages are just XML, but they are literally binary XML, in that I have no way of really looking inside and figuring out what is going on. Oh, I can probably put it through a prettifier and then try to have a look-see, but that is a costly endevour, and not really practical for anything beyond getting the bloody connection string out of the file.

Just today I was looking at SSIS package, it was changed, but I have no idea what the change was, so I run a diff. It came back with a lot of changes, non of which told me, an occational (reluctant) dabbler of SSIS what the hell had happened.

Just this, the inability to understand what the hell has changed from a diff file, is a serious offence against the maintainability of most of the "no code" approaches (but reams of XML).

Urgh!

In other news, Boo got better support for creating DSLs.