Re: [Json] Consensus on JSON-text (WAS: JSON: remove gap between Ecma-404 and IETF draft)

[Alex Russell <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 11:51 PM, Tim Berners-Lee <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> JSON is interesting in being a subset of ECMAscript.  That is a big
>> dependency -- will it be preserved?
>> However as it is unwise to feed JSON into an ECMAscript processor for
>> security reasons, that dependency may not affect code, just mean that JSON
>> and ECMAscript parsers can share parts at  the moment.
>>
>
> As I see it, encoding X is a subset of encoding Y if and only if an
> encoder for X will only produce outputs that are valid inputs of encoding Y.
>
> If an issue was to occur it would be because encoding Y has changed or the
> definition of Y has changed.
>
>
> One could imagine that the arc of ECMAscript's evolution could end up
>> having all kinds of impact on the data structure syntax and semantics.
>> (unordered sets as alternative to lists? who knows).  So in that case one
>> could imagine pressure to make a new version of JSON to match.
>>
>
> Since we are talking about a serialization format, the distinction between
> unordered sets and lists cannot occur at the wire level and this is where
> we need interoperation.
>
> I do in fact have a schema compiler for JSON that allows an interface to
> specify a set of entries rather than a list. But they are only ever
> serialized as lists.
>
> Yes, literal ISO dates and dateTimes -- I added them to my own N3/turtle
>> parsers without much fanfare, wish they had been put in the Turtle language
>> too.  Maybe they will.
>>
>
> And you probably do exactly what I do and represent a DateTime
> representation as a subset of String just as byte, int16, int32, int64,
> uint* are all subsets of Integer.
>
> One of the things I think we have learned from JSON is that a
> self-describing format only needs to specify the abstract type of the datum
> and not the representation.
>
> For convenience, I allow a schema to specify the size of an integer and
> whether it is signed or unsigned so that the code generator can create
> appropriate code bindings. But none of that shows up on the wire, nor is
> that particularly helpful.
>
>
> What we are doing at this point is to fix a version of the JSON encoding
> in time so that when a client and server are negotiating use of JSON
> encoding, both sides know what is being negotiated.
>
> So hopefully JSON does not change in future, only the description of JSON.
>
>
> That is not the same as saying that JSON meets all possible current and
> future protocol needs. It does not. It is not possible to pass binary data
> efficiently for a start and using decimal for floating point representation
> is likely to make the format unacceptable for serious data applications
> since it introduces conversion errors.
>
> The next question is whether those unmet needs should be addressed by an
> entirely new encoding with a completely new syntax and structure or whether
> we could extend the JSON model. My view is that we should do the second.
>

This seems entirely reasonable, so long as this extension is not called
"JSON" (assuming it adds new grammar productions). Hence the request to
normatively cite ECMA-404 and re-name any IETF-produced spec to reflect
that it is intended to be a media-type registration (or extension document
for protocol authoring, etc.), not an alternate (and therefore perhaps
extensible) definition of JSON.


> XML is fine for documents but it is not meeting my needs as a protocol
> designer. I find XML Schema to be unnecessarily confusing and baroque, the
> schema validation features supported don't help me in application
> protocols. XML does not support binary encoding of cryptographic data or
> floating point.
>
> There are many data encodings on offer but I would like to be able to
> write one decoder that can consume a data stream that contains basic JSON
> data and JSON with extensions. This makes negotiating an encoding in a Web
> service easy, the consumer states which encodings are acceptable and the
> sender makes sure what is sent is compatible, downgrading the encoding to
> the level accepted if necessary.
>
> --
> Website: http://hallambaker.com/
>