[Json] "best practices" Vs. Profile for i-json

[Larry Masinter <[e-mail]>]

My conclusion after some discussions at IETF is that i-json needs to separate "best practices" vs "profile".

The SHOULD belongs with best practices: e.g., "numbers in I-JSON SHOULD be representable by IEEE floating point."

If you want a real profile, though, you need clear criteria:
"All numeric values in I-JSON MUST round-trip to IEEE floating point and back to the same string." 
And then if you want an exception, make it application dependent: "the result must be JSON and SHOULD be I-JSON".

But the current doc mixes these together in a way that makes it less useful.

If you don't want both, just do the profile.  

Related topic: consider I-JSON a kind of normalization to an idealized JSON data model. Make the data model explicit.
Insure round-trip between data model and i-json is not information lossy.
Then any operation which defines itself in terms of the data model and not the textual representation would automatically get i-json output, such as Merge/patch and schemas.


Larry
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http://larry.masinter.net