Re: [Json] BOMs

[[e-mail] (Henry S. Thompson)]

Allen Wirfs-Brock writes:

> There can be no doubt that the most widely deployed JSON parsers are
> those that are built intp the browser javascript implementations.
> The ECMAScript 5 specification for JSON.parse that they implement
> says BOM is an illegal character.  But what do the browser actually
> implement?  This:

No, try e.g. jsonviewer.stack.hu [1] (works in Chrome, Safari, Opera,
not in IE or Firefox) or feed [2] to www.jsoneditoronline.org (Use
Open/Url) (works in Chrome, IE, Firefox, ran out of time to test more).

As previously discussed, _no-one_ is arguing that BOMs are in the JSON
language as such.  JSON parsers shouldn't accept BOMs.

BOMs are, to quote the UNICODE spec, "not part of the text".  It is
appropriate that specs concerned with JSON-on-the-wire, for example
the media type registration for 'application/json', _should_ discuss
the BOM, and it's open to them, _without changing the language at
all_, to say that BOMs are acceptable but, again, are not part of the
text which the parser has to accept.

ht

[1] http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/#http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ov-test/b16le.json
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
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                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
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