Re: [netmod] json empty leaf encoding strangeness [Re: WG Last Call for draft-ietf-netmod-yang-json-04 (until 2015-06-29)]

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2021-12-18, at 14:35, Christian Hopps <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> This isn't about the YANG specification in general, or making YANG conform to any particular language. It's just about the a choice in the specification for the encoding of YANG in a particular format (JSON).

I understand the objective to have a good representation for YANG data.

For instance, in YANG-CBOR, a YANG empty is represented as a CBOR null (0xf6, in case you need to visualize the bits); there is no expectation that this will be difficult to handle by CBOR implementations.

However, there is nothing wrong with representing empty with the array »[null]« in YANG-JSON.  It is just more complex, and apparently unnecessarily so.
Whether removing this complexity to save two characters is worth doing an incompatible upgrade to the YANG-JSON representation format can be debated.
I’d say: emphatically no.

The other motivation that came up in this thread is that it is natural to have null as a value in JSON and YANG cannot describe such formats via YANG-JSON.  This was what I was reacting to, but, as you say, that wasn’t your question.

Grüße, Carsten