Useability is not good

Posted Dec 22, 2025 9:15 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: Useability is not good by mbunkus
Parent article: Conill: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities

Where XML really loses is its ridiculous escaping system with giant lookup tables, making every XML library comparatively huge and escaping support a pain to implement.

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Useability is not good

Posted Dec 22, 2025 9:37 UTC (Mon) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link] (1 responses)

> Where XML really loses is its ridiculous escaping system with giant lookup tables

What are you referring to exactly? XML's escaping system defines exactly 5 entities (lt, gt, amp, apos, quot), a way for DTD authors to define their own entities (sadly known for the "billion laughs" attack), and a generic mechanism for referring to Unicode codepoints (ø for ø). None of that requires "giant lookup tables".

Maybe you're mixing XML with HTML, whose predefined list of char entities is quite long and contains unusual things like " &npart; (partial differential, combining long solidus overlay)"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_XML_and_HTML_charac...

Useability is not good

Posted Dec 22, 2025 10:24 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link]

Well, HTML and pretty much any concrete XML format I have ever had the displeasure of dealing with. The basic design of the entity system is just deeply flawed when compared to much simpler escaping mechanism in other text formats. I'd much rather deal with five levels of backslash escaping in a template that generates shell code that uses regular expression parameters to modify some other stuff with backslash escaping than with XML and that is not because nested backslash escaping is fun to deal with (especially when each level has slightly different things that need backslash escaping).