XML export / HTML export

[chainsawriot]

Let's talk about HTML/XML.

Can rio::export(iris, "iris.html") do a better job than writeLines(knitr::kable(iris, format = "html"), "iris.html")? Or is it not very useful?

Should we encourage exporting to some XML formats with an Open Standard schema, e.g. FODS, rather than the so-called "Shallow XML document"?

Of course, the meta-question is: Do you use these XML / HTML features? Could we deprecate them?

[chainsawriot]

Benchmark: https://chainsawriot.com/postmannheim/2023/09/21/benchmark.html

[jsonbecker]

I don't really think that these are appropriate formats for storing data myself, but I suspect that at least some folks who use rio may encounter XML they need to read. That format is at least used as an intentional data exchange format some times. HTML, on the other hand, is primarily useful for presentation or for scraping, where other tooling will have the ability built in.

So IMO, HTML should be removed, but we could perhaps keep some XML support. What is appropriate for XML support, I'm less sure, having, blissfully, not encountered it in the wild from static files on disk that I would use R for.