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

[Brian Kardell <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Yes indeed.  Yes indeed.   The double quote may not appear within
> quotation marks, by a two-to-one vote.
>
> peter
>
>
> On 10/08/2013 11:32 AM, Tim Bray wrote:
>
>> On the other hand, the opening paragraph of section 9 makes sure that
>> you’re really clear about which characters may and may not be placed
>> between quotation marks.
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 11:26 AM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider <
>> [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]**>> wrote:
>>
>>     The paragraph on numbers, see below, seems rather dangerous, as well
>> as
>>     being incorrect.  The paragraph on strings, also below, ignores all
>> the
>>     problems with escaped code units that do not represent a Unicode code
>> point.
>>
>>     peter
>>
>>
>>     On 10/08/2013 09:42 AM, John Cowan wrote:
>>
>>         Allen Wirfs-Brock scripsit:
>>
>>             The draft was approved by a letter ballot of the Ecma General
>>             Assembly.  It is now available as Ecma-404:
>>
>>         Almost all of it is derived directly from the RFC, with some
>> editorial
>>         cleanup.  The Introduction, however, is new.  I reproduce it here
>> in
>>         case
>>         the Editor wishes to mine it for anything:
>>         [...]
>>
>>
>>              JSON is agnostic about numbers. In any programming language,
>>              there can be a variety of number types of various capacities
>>              and complements, fixed or floating, binary or decimal. That
>>              can make interchange between different programming languages
>>              difficult. JSON instead offers only the representation of
>> numbers
>>              that humans use: a sequence of digits. All programming
>> languages
>>              know how to make sense of digit sequences even if they
>> disagree
>>              on internal representations. That is enough to allow
>> interchange.
>>
>>              JSON text is a sequence of Unicode code points. JSON also
>> depends
>>              on Unicode in the hex numbers used in the \u escapement [sic]
>>              notation.
>>         [...]
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
So I guess my big question I keep asking myself is this:  Despite the fact
that it didn't involve standards bodies and committees to get out the door
- JSON is really *really* interoperable.  There are potentially some edge
cases, but given its importance to the Web it does seem like the ECMA
version is the most important baseline here.  If we want to make
improvements, why not just invent some other thing - not JSON... Call it
"super json" or "phil" or - just something else...And let that something
else attempt to address perceived problems and make some minor comments
about the ability to parse a subset of it with the standard JSON parsers
that conform to ECMA-404 or something and then go out there and compete and
see if it actually does better.  Maybe it will and we can all go have beers
and laugh about it, but - maybe it won't and at least we don't have to
break things.


-- 
Brian Kardell :: @briankardell