mis-XML

There is a style of XML which I find quite frustrating. Here's a fragment:

    <mbeanNode>
      <name>java.lang:type=Memory
      <attributes>
        <attribute>
          <name>HeapMemoryUsage</name>
          <formattedValue>{committed=442433536, init=257990592, max=3670540288, used=103328176}</formattedValue>
         </attribute>
         <attribute>
           <name>NonHeapMemoryUsage</name>
           <formattedValue>{committed=57802752, init=24313856, max=224395264, used=57610720}</formattedValue></attribute>

This particular example came from XML output of javamelody, although I've encountered this misuse on a number of other occasions.

Most annoying is the guerilla formatting inside the <formattedValue> tag. XML already provides plenty of ways to pair up names and values, so why make a guerilla format that I now need to parse myself?

A smaller annoyance is the use of <attribute><key>X</key><value>V</value></attribute> style. XML already provides a mechanism for tagging a named key onto a value: <key>value</key>. The only defence of this I've heard is that it makes it easier to comply with a schema; but alas you miss the point and are also wrong. Wrong, because I can make an XML schema that accepts arbitrary XML tags; and missing the point, because the schema doesn't help much if all its doing is enforcing a skeleton.

I think all of this comes from fairly naive serialization of improperly defined application-internal data structures. suck.