Re: If not JSON, what then ?

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> If containers are only allowed to contain simple types, the need for a schema language diminishes quite a bit; headers can be defined pretty easily in prose, perhaps with references to registries where appropriate.

The same observation could be made of textual information and ABNF.
In the last 40 years, the industry has converged on using BNF in
specifications of languages as a matter of routine for a number of good
reasons; these become even stronger with a standard notation such as
ABNF which allows throwing some tooling into the specification process
without losing the benefit of a human-readable notation.
Yes, I have run into people who see little value in adding ABNF to
specifications; the benefit may not be universal for all users of a
specification.

I expect the same kind of benefits from using CDDL for JSON-like data
models.  (We had a similar discussion for COSE, which is very simple as
a data model, too*); still the CDDL snippets do help many spec readers,
and the tooling also does help in validating the examples against the spec.)

Grüße, Carsten

*) Well, OK, it *does* have recursion in the recipients in the
encryption spec.

(Pet peeve: "Schema languages" fundamentally come from a database world
and try to solve a different problem, even though they may overlap with
tree grammars; but the usage has become sufficiently confused in the
last 20 years that I won't insist on this difference.  But I won't get
caught calling CDDL a "schema language"...)