Re: [Json] JSON irritants

["Manger, James" <[e-mail]>]

Yuck for i800 and f49.399. I’d prefer the presence of a decimal point “.” or exponent symbol “e” to imply a float; and their absence to imply an integer.

Optional commas sounds okay. I wouldn’t like to forbid them as [11, 234, 5, 6] is nicer than [11 234 5 6].

Encouraging yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss[.sss…]Z for instants of time is great. I’m less sure that distinguishing it from a string is so crucial.

--
James Manger

From: json [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of Tim Bray
Sent: Wednesday, 3 August 2016 3:18 PM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: [Json] JSON irritants

I have recently been doing an unreasonable amount of JSON work, what with editing the drafts here, helping design AWS’s CloudWatch Events service [1], and now working on an interesting JSON DSL that with any luck will decloak later this year.

I have encountered the following irritants:

1. When hand-editing JSON, it is unreasonably difficult to get the commas right.
2. When using JSON numbers, the sender *always* knows whether integers or floats are intended, but there’s no way to communicate this information.
3. There is no timestamp literal.

Then I realized that the comma is not necessary to the grammar, it’s only there for JavaScript compatibility.  Bah.  Anyhow, here’s the example object from RFC7159:

   {
     "Image": {
         "Width":  800,
         "Height": 600,
         "Title":  "View from 15th Floor",
         "Thumbnail": {
             "Url":    "http://www.example.com/image/481989943",
             "Height": 125,
             "Width":  100
         },
         "Animated" : false,
         "IDs": [116, 943, 234, 38793]
       }
   }

Here’s a version with a couple more fields and the irritants removed:

  {
     "Image": {
         "Width":  i800
         "Height": i600
         "Title":  "View from 15th Floor"
         "Thumbnail": {
             "Url":    "http://www.example.com/image/481989943"
             "Height": i125
             "Width":  i100
         }
         "Location": {
             "Latitude": f49.399673
             "Longitude": f-123.508437
         }
         "Animated" : false
         "Capture Time": @2016-08-01T18:15:00Z
         "IDs": [i116 i943 i234 i38793]
       }
   }


I thought of a friendly acronym and bought a domain name and wrote an I-D too, but I thought it might be polite and useful to test the waters here, example first.

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/CloudWatchEventsandEventPatterns.html