Re: [Json] FYI ECMA, W3C, IETF coordination on JSON

[Brian Kardell <[e-mail]>]

On Oct 8, 2013 3:48 PM, "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <[e-mail]>
wrote:
>
> I had first thought that JSON was really really interoperable.  Then I
saw all the problems JSON-LD had with JSON.  Then I looked closer and saw
the problems in JSON with numbers, and strings, and arrays. Then I said to
myself "There really is no problem - although the syntax of JSON is too
loose, and the description is too loose, everyone interprets JSON as if it
was transmitting ECMAScript values."  Then I realized that this is not the
case, and, moreover, that even ECMAScript JSON doesn't match the intuitive
description of JSON.
>
> So I would say that JSON is only interoperable if you don't care too much
about interoperability, and you don't hit any of the really ugly corner
cases.
>

> So why then is JSON so successful?  Well, it's easy to write, easy to
read, matches programming language data fairly closely, and either you are
both producer and consumer or you don't care that your system works
correctly all the time so you don't care that JSON does not support
interoperability.
>

And I would simply say "that is an over-statement".  Of course the world
cares about interoperability and JSON is the lingua franca of data that
makes the Web go round every single day.  Problems and opinions are not
necessarily the same thing "JSON should specify X but doesn't" (where X is
something about dates or numbers or schema validation) doesn't mean we
don't make it actually work in the real world to do an astonishing number
of real things.  Breaking things is really where I would draw the line WRT
the language itself personally - parsers just *have* to be able parse what
they did before, pretty much the way they did before or you risk making
things measurably *less* interoperable in the vast majority of cases in the
name of making it more so.

There is absolutely nothing, and I mean *nothing* from being something a
lot *like* JSON, even a superset capable of parsing the basic subset of
today's JSON the same way and turning it into a forward/competitive move.
 It can be as opinionated as you/we want - and there is literally no
problem.