Re: [Json] JSON for Internet messages

[Jacob Davies <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Tim Bray <[e-mail]> wrote:
> So I care a lot about JSON, but I don’t care in the slightest about usages
> where the JSON isn’t being used for application-level message protocol
> payloads (are there such usages?  I'm curious).

There are a number of practical use cases for JSON that don't fall
into the neat "externally delimited stream of bytes described by an
application/json media-type" category. That is a separate question to
whether the RFC needs to do much to accomodate them.

1. Files named ".json" and containing a single JSON object or array.
2. Text documents containing embedded JSON - informally, as in
documentation or books, or formally, as in Javascript in HTML or .js
files.
3. Database records where text or binary columns store embedded JSON
representing complex nested objects.

Case 1 is handled the same as a message described as application/json,
no big deal. Cases 2 & 3 may require accommodating non-Unicode
encodings, and may have some special security concerns (e.g.
additional escaping for HTML or Javascript embedding). It would be
nice if the spec separated format from encoding, but it's unlikely to
be the source of any significant problems since in most cases the
handling of encoding will have happened by the time you parse the
text, and the security concerns can be addressed in best-practices.

> Also, I’ve never encountered a scenario where the messages were of sufficient size that
> anyone gave a rat’s ass about streaming.

Me either, and even if there were such cases I find the concerns about
maintaining state unconvincing - maintaining a seen-keys dictionary
for each level of nesting you're in is not all that much of an
imposition or incompatible with a streaming API.