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Re: [apps-discuss] JSON Schema considered harmful

Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> Thu, 20 September 2012 20:05 UTC

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From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
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To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
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Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] JSON Schema considered harmful
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On 20/09/2012, at 9:53 AM, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> wrote:

> I believe:
> - ASN.1 has been bypassed by history and has truly horrible tooling. Just don’t go there.
> - If you’re interchanging documents, use XML; if (much more common) you’re interchanging data structures, use JSON.
> - Do not use multiple syntaxes for the same protocol. Pick one of XML or JSON and stick with it.
> - The most important thing in defining a protocol is good clean comprehensible human-readable prose.
> - All the protocols I’ve ever seen have important constraints that can’t be expressed usefully in declarative schema languages.
> - Therefore, the next most important thing is an automated validator/test-suite.
> - A schema is a nice-to-have.
> - If you’re in XML and want schema-ware, use RelaxNG. For an example, see RFC4287.
> - If your protocol is JSON, investment in a validator/test-suite has much higher ROI than chasing schema unicorns.

+1; somebody please give this a BCP#.

--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

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