Fixing JSON

Shameful confession: when I was first introduced to JSON, I was convinced it would go nowhere. "XML already does everything JSON does! And there's no way to differentiate between nodes and attributes! And there are no namespaces! And no schemas! What's the point of JSON?" And a couple of years later I looked up from the tangled mess of XSLT I was working on to discover that the rest of the world had moved on.

JSON is just javascript, and it leaves out everything else. That's its entire reason for existing, and it caught on because that's all that 99.44% of anyone needed.

Timestamps you can add today, without changing the protocol; just put them in your data if you need them. So I'm not sure what he's even proposing there.

Schemas: OK, he doesn't like JSON Schema's anyOf. Fair enough. There's no real proposal here for how to fix it, so not much to say here.

Replacing commas with whitespace sounds to me like replacing a very minor irritant with a constant full-body rash. Stuff like his example of "IDs": [ 116 943 234 38793 ] would lead to far more confusion and errors than the occasional stray trailing comma.

So I guess I pretty much vote no on this one thanks for asking

"Timestamps you can add today, without changing the protocol; just put them in your data if you need them. So I'm not sure what he's even proposing there."

He is proposing to add a timestamp type to the grammar. This would have the advantage that there would be one canonical way to have timestamps in your JSON. It would also mean that the parser would already validate them for you and you would not have to do that yourself every time.

I definitely see value in that.

> He is proposing to add a timestamp type to the grammar. This would have the advantage that there would be one canonical way to have timestamps in your JSON.

There is already a canonical way to have timestamps: encode them as defined in RFC 3339.

Done.

The proposals add nothing to JSON and don't make sense. I mean, screwing up with the language just to add a very specific data type that is used in only a specific corner case that isn't even supported in the use case that's provided as an example? Nonsense.