Re: [Json] Schemas & so on

[Cyrus Daboo <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

--On May 3, 2016 at 10:10:00 AM +1000 Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]> wrote:

> This general area of discussion came up in the IETF maybe two years ago;
> can dig around in archives if people are interested, but IIRC it was
> mostly hallway-based.
>
> I'd characterise the general feeling then as "run away screaming"; the
> wounds of XSD / WS-* were too fresh.
>
> It came up again more recently (again, the hallway track), and the
> feeling I got was that people were more amenable to it, but still
> concerned about the numerous pitfalls.
>
> It strikes me that it might be worth writing down what we think is good
> in such a beast, and what would be not-good. Getting agreement on that
> might be... interesting, but if we had such a document (or maybe just a
> wiki page), we'd be able to evaluate the current contenders, at least.
>

At the time my personal reason for wanting something like this was not so 
much to have a formal "schema" or "rules", but rather something that could 
be used in protocol specs to "describe" what JSON an implementor would 
expect to see in a request or response. That is a very real problem that we 
faced when developing RFC7808 - which is a JSON-based HTTP protocol. 
Initially I wrote that using an early version of 
draft-newton-json-content-rules, but since that did not progress to 
publication, we were asked to switch to using the format developed in 
RFC7071 (<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7071#section-6.2>).

So, rather than a formal "schema", I would rather see this group focus on a 
standard way to "describe" JSON structures in protocol specs, with the goal 
of having something easy to understand or base implementations off. Perhaps 
a purely informational document is all that is needed.


-- 
Cyrus Daboo