Re: [netmod] JSON to XML lossy conversion

[Ladislav Lhotka <[e-mail]>]

On 17. 07. 20 14:42, Juergen Schoenwaelder wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 02:12:06PM +0200, Ladislav Lhotka wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 17. 07. 20 12:03, Vladimir Vassilev wrote:
>>> On 17/07/2020 09.11, Ladislav Lhotka wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 17. 07. 20 8:57, Michal Vaško wrote:
>>>>> Hi Carsten,
>>>>> you had an interesting idea to have tools that could warn about these
>>>>> problems (although that is hardly a proper solution) but it is not
>>>>> really possible because the problem may occur whenever there is union
>>>>> with a 'string' and 'int8' - 'int32', 'uint8' - 'uint32', or
>>>>> 'boolean', in any order. Meaning in lots of, if not most, unions. And
>>>>> I have considered only XML and JSON, I have not looked into CBOR,
>>>>> which may make it even worse.
>>>> What you can do is to define a metadata annotation specifying the union
>>>> member for a particular instance, and implement it in your tools. This
>>>> would be a solution independent of instance representation.
>>>
>>>
>>> IMO this does not solve the problem that XML can not encode all values
>>> of the value space in certain awkward unions (JSON and CBOR can't do
>>> that either only the constraints are alternative supersets).
>>
>> Why not? In XML, everything is encoded as text, and the annotation tells
>> how to parse it and interpret. So either the text representation
>> conforms to that precise type or otherwise it is an error. There is no
>> ambiguity.
>>
> 
> An annotation that is only understood by some tools and not by others
> is creating a new problem since different tools now start to interpret
> data in different ways, i.e., the annotation harms interoperability.

I agree, it should eventually be standardized, if it turns out to be a
good idea. But to find out, experience with running code always helps.

Lada

> 
> /js
> 

-- 
Ladislav Lhotka
Head, CZ.NIC Labs
PGP Key ID: 0xB8F92B08A9F76C67