[xquery-talk] Izzit Bcos I is functional?

[Michael Kay]

> 
> But you can pretty much model the semantic equivalent of JSON data without having to use a Schema, namespace, PI or any  traverse any other of these treacherous terrains. Call it XML the Good Parts (Hmmmm where did I get that idea from). JSON is a very expensive over-reaction. There was no need to invent another format and then make in non-interoperable with XML. 
> 
>  

Actually, I don’t agree. The cost of doing simple things with XML, like configuration files, is far too high (because of all the other things it is capable of that you don’t need for such cases) and there was a very real need for something simpler for that kind of application. Restricting yourself to a subset of XML doesn’t greatly reduce the cost of writing code to process it, you still have to use the same APIs. Perhaps it could have been achieved with some kind of MicroXML, but as a community, we failed to deliver that.

Michael Kay
Saxonica