Top all-time · #7391
James Clark
Personal blog · blog.jclark.comprogrammingsystems
James Clark's personal blog at blog.jclark.com covers programming and systems. Since 2010, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “A tour of the open standards used by Google Buzz”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
James Clark's posts on XML namespaces, JSON, schema languages, microXML and SGML. Commenters cite them as background for debates about XML design, though none praise the writing directly.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A tour of the open standards used by Google Buzz2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-02-21
- XML Namespaces: naming instances vs types2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-01-02
- XML vs the Web2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-11-24
What Hacker News says?
XML namespaces were controversial when introduced, and their implementation as privileged "xmlns:..." attributes with complex scoping, layering, and defaulting rules have been criticized many times; see [1] for a reflection from 2010 by an insider admitting to the fact that "every step on the process that led to the current situation with XML Namespaces seems reasonable". When in 1996-98 W3C/The SGML Extended Review…
Comment linking /2010/01/xml-namespaces.html
on “Coordinated disclosure of XML roundtrip vulnerabilities in Go’s standard library”Submitted A tour of the open standards used by Google Buzz as a story · 22 points
HN discussionNice to meet a fellow SGML fan! > When you say that macros/entities may contain parameters, I think you are referring to recursive entity expansion, No, I'm referring to SGML data attributes (attributes declared on notations having concrete values defined on entities of the respective notation); cf. [1]. In sgmljs.net SGML, these can be used for SGML templating which is a way of using data entities declared as havin…
Comment linking /2010/01/xml-namespaces.html
on “Rewriting my website in plain HTML and CSS”Submitted XML vs the Web as a story · 18 points
HN discussionThere is an impressive amount of variation regarding personal name formats even within Asia. In my culture (Thai), I put my given name first and then my family name (inherited from my father), like in most of the west, but actually my name of formal address is my first , given name, and my family name is hardly ever used except as a differentiator. [1] In Vietnamese culture, I believe the given name is also the name…
Comment linking /2007/12/thai-personal-names.html
on “Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names”Submitted Why Ballerina Is a Language as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> adding namespaces to your format Granted, in the case of XMPP (but I'm no expert here) they might have overused namespaces with all those protocol extensions (XEPs) using their own NS. XML namespaces are one of the few additions on top of SGML and might've looked like a good idea at a time when many new vocabularies were expected, but they're controversial even among those who introduced them. Eg consider the foll…
Comment linking /2010/01/xml-namespaces.html
on “IETF should keep XMPP as IM standard, instead of Matrix”Submitted XML Namespaces: naming instances vs types as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere’s lots of detail in the language spec: https://ballerina.io/spec/lang/2019R3/ I also wrote a blog explaining what we are trying to achieve: https://blog.jclark.com/2019/09/ballerina-programming-langua...
Comment linking /2019/09/ballerina-programming-language-part-1.html
on “Ballerina Programing Language”James Clark argues that it's useful to have multiple specialized schema definition languages, each for their own purpose, so putting one reference to one "official" schema in one "official" language inside the document doesn't make sense. For example, you might want to perform one kind of quick simple input sanity checking validation that ensures the input won't crash your processor, to perform in real time on milli…
Comment linking /2009/01/relax-ng-and-xmlid.html
on “JSON5 Data Interchange Format”XML DTDs were inherited from SGML. They can also be defined externally, but with internal links to them embedded in the document. XML Schema were supposed to fix all the problems of DTDs, but they don't support unordered content, and have a host of their own problems. XML Schema are typically external XML documents referenced by an xsi:schemaLocation attribute, but apparently you can embed them too. But I don't know…
Comment linking /2010/11/xml-vs-web_24.html
on “JSON5 Data Interchange Format”Maybe I bring you James Clark (technical lead for XML, among others): http://blog.jclark.com/2010/01/xml-namespaces.html Namespaces in XML is a foot shooting feature. Sure it has its uses, but still a misfeature.
Comment linking /2010/01/xml-namespaces.html
on “HTML6 Concept”More words from James Clark on JSON: "Yay" and "Sigh" http://blog.jclark.com/2010/11/xml-vs-web_24.html >If other formats start to supplant XML, and they support these goals better than XML, I will be happy rather than worried. >From this perspective, my reaction to JSON is a combination of "Yay" and "Sigh". >It's "Yay", because for important use cases JSON is dramatically better than XML. In particular, JSON shines…
Comment linking /2010/11/xml-vs-web_24.html
on “The rise and rise of JSON (2017)”The article "XML Sucks" containing that Ward Cunningham image is interesting: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/ It includes this classic James Clark quote: “Any damn fool could produce a better data format than XML” – James Clark 2007-04-06 Which Tim Bray discussed in "Any Damn Fool": https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/04/08/James-Cla... Tim Bray recommended James Clark's Random Thoughts about "Do we…
Comment linking /2007/04/do-we-need-new-kind-of-schema-language.html
on “The rise and rise of JSON (2017)”Mashup engines were so gloriously hopeful. It feels like Opera browser was super early (as usual), with widgets (2008). Eventually we had a widget spec (2013). Overall PWAs cover a lot of this terrain today as a packagable standalone webapp, but also there was a lot more excitement in the world about small UI programs that overlayed and/or worked with your desktop at large, that we don't see today (but omgosh I wish…
Comment linking /2010/02/tour-of-open-standards-used-by-google.html
on “Let the little guys in: A context sharing runtime for the personalised web”> SGML isn't that complex. It's unnecessarily complex. The complexity and the features it has have no purpose once you step away and look at the big picture. People don't want to use it. It's easier to write your own dataformat than use and learn SGML. XML was a move away. HTML5 was move away. Heck, just microXML is enough https://blog.jclark.com/2010/12/more-on-microxml.html Starting from scratch something like s-e…
Comment linking /2010/12/more-on-microxml.html
on “HTML Tags (1991)”I've just learnt that James Clark (of SP and general SGML fame, and missed by the markup community) and WSO2 is behind Ballerina [1]. [1]: https://blog.jclark.com/2019/09/ballerina-programming-langua...
Comment linking /2019/09/ballerina-programming-language-part-0.html
on “Ballerina Programming Language Revamped, at 1.0”Even the original designers of XML (those responsible for subsetting XML from SGML, and those responsible for dropping the ball by adding XML namespaces on top ;) aren't happy with it [1]. As to why URIs, I completely agree. I think URIs/URLs were introduced by TBL as arguably the major feat of HTML over generic SGML along with <a> and so phenomenally successful every W3C mechanism of name resolution and namespacing…
Comment linking /2010/01/xml-namespaces.html
on “Using XPath in 2023”
