Re: [Json] Gen-ART and OPS-Dir review of draft-ietf-json-text-sequence-10

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

<shepherd hat on>

Thanks for the followup comments on -10. In general, I think they are fine, and Nico could put out a -11 before IESG telechat review. See below.

On Dec 10, 2014, at 7:51 AM, Black, David <[e-mail]> wrote:
> The -10 version of this draft resolves items [A]-[E] from the
> Gen-ART and OPS-Dir review of -09, and the IESG is in the process of
> resolving the (silly) idnits complaint about RFC 20 being a possible
> downref.
> 
> For item [D], a different approach was taken instead of modifying
> the ABNF - the resulting new Section 2.4 is a definite improvement
> to the draft, and is significantly clearer than the modified ABNF
> would have been.  Nicely done.
> 
> Item [F] about the <angle-bracketed> text in the IANA Considerations
> (Section 4) remains open - if the intent is to not deal with replacing
> that text until after IESG approval, an RFC Editor Note to that effect
> should be added to Section 4.

David: I disagree with the need for this change. The RFC Editor can interpret the current wording just fine.

> I have an additional editorial concern - given all the discussion about
> UTF-8, it would be good for the draft to make it clear early on 
> that JSON text sequences are UTF-8 only.  Here are some suggested changes.
> 
> Abstract:
> 
>   This document describes the JSON text sequence format and associated
>   media type, "application/json-seq".  A JSON text sequence consists of
>   any number of JSON texts, each prefix by an Record Separator
>   (U+001E), and each ending with a newline character (U+000A).
> 
> "any number of JSON texts" -> "any number of UTF-8 encoded JSON texts"

This change concerns me, because it sounds like a JSON text sequence could consist of JSON texts encoded in UTF-8 and other encodings. I would instead prefer "any number of JSON texts, all encoded in UTF-8,".

I also just now noticed that there is a typo in the abstract: it should say "each prefix*ed*". 

> It also looks like ASCII names for RS and LF are being mixed w/Unicode
> codepoints in the second sentence in the abstract.  I'm not sure that's
> a good thing to do, especially as the body of the draft refers to RS and
> LF as being ASCII.  Here are a couple of changes that would remedy this:
> 
>   "an Record Separator (U+001E)" -> "an ASCII Record Separator (0x1E)"
>   "a newline character (U+000A)" -> "an ASCII newline character (0x0A)"

With John Cowan's change ("an ASCII Line Feed character (0x1E)" instead of "an ASCII Record Separator (0x1E)"), that would indeed be clearer.

> Section 2 JSON Text Sequence Format:
> 
> I suggest adding this sentence as a separate paragraph at the end of this
> section (i.e., just before Section 2.1):
> 
>   JSON text sequences MUST use UTF-8 encoding; other encodings of JSON
>   (i.e., UTF-16 and UTF-32) MUST NOT be used.
> 

That seems like a good clarifying addition as well.

Nico: could you issue a -11 with the above changes?

--Paul Hoffman