Re: [Json] Kicking Off JSONbis

[Anders Rundgren <[e-mail]>]

On 2015-11-09 22:20, Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr) wrote:
> On 11/5/15, 1:49 AM, "json on behalf of Anders Rundgren" <[e-mail] on behalf of [e-mail]> wrote:
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>> Since EMCAScript introduces predictable property order, the reference to EMCA-404 doesn't
>> really tell the whole interoperability story.
> That predictability has nothing to do with the wire format, though.  It's specific to the ECMAscript serializer and does not affect the semantics of the generated document.  It's not even terribly useful for canonicalization, without going to the trouble of creating a new ES object built in the correct order, which seems error-prone.

On the creation side there is nothing special to do in an ES6 environment.  In a non-ES6 JSON toolbox, you only need to use an ordered dictionary like LinkedHashMap in Java to get things right. Well, numeric properties would need something else but that appears to be an edge-case, not worth bothering with.   For those who disagree with that, strict creation order does in no way rule out numeric property order, it only requires a bit more care by the programmer :-)

>   On the parse side, I *guess* you might want to know that there is an information signal retained by the order of properties.  That could be used as a steganographic channel, for instance.  It doesn't seem specific to ES, though.
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> I think there maybe some other reason why ES's property order logic might be interesting to you though - can you say more, please?
>

My target application has since mid-2013 been a JSONesque counterpart to XML's enveloped signatures but without getting bogged down by complex, stand-alone canonicalizers.  The latest developments seem to verify that the most difficult part of JSON (Numbers), also are properly canonicalized by the majority (but not all) ES6 implementations.  This enables very simple and efficient "in-object" JavaScript and JSON signatures which only rely on standard JavaScript for creating and manipulating objects and the built-in JSON parse/stringify methods for parsing and serialization respectively:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/jose/s5TdEtfOdQ0z3Qmtij2yXemZW-A

Anders