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[Json-canon] Dropping "Comparable" JSON

Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com> Sat, 09 February 2019 07:05 UTC

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From: Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com>
To: json-canon@ietf.org
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Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2019 08:05:31 +0100
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Subject: [Json-canon] Dropping "Comparable" JSON
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All,
This is an open question.
Ideally you want a design to cover as many use-cases as possible, right?
Sometimes that ambition turns out to be counterproductive making your most important use-cases suffer.


When I in retrospect look at
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rundgren-json-canonicalization-scheme-04
I begin to wonder if "Comparable" JSON (in the draft named "true" canonicalization) shouldn't be a "Feature at Risk" as the W3C folks call this.

Why is that?  Well, to begin with "Comparable" JSON leaves a lot of thorny decisions to some other document or entity to worry about:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rundgren-json-canonicalization-scheme-04#appendix-E.2

In addition, having actually built a few test systems comparing JSON data, I note that the possibility for creating 100% stable input data is unlikely to be particularly common. Time stamps, transaction IDs and last but not least crypto, makes this requirement rather hard to achieve in practice.

That is, "Comparable" JSON appears to be a difficult edge case and IMHO [probably] not worth dealing with. The 80/20 rule is pretty much a fact.

This seems like an ideal topic for the BoF session we have requested :-)

WDYT?

Anders

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