Re: JSON-LD vs. JSON: pro vs. con?

On 24 Sep 2014, at 17:40, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> The last meeting with had a quite vigorous discussion of JSON and JSON-LD.
> 
> I'd like to see folks who want JSON-LD as a requirement justify their
> position, and folks who would like to see it as an option but not
> required justify their position.
> 
> Let the fun begin :)

Ok. Hope this is the last time we do this:

+1 for JSON-LD as a requirement
 with the priviso: where it makes sense.
 
For example it is possible to put RDF in an HTTP Link header
using https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988 

Or if someone publishes the data in HTML there
are a number of solutions there that integrate better with those.

But given that the WG has as agreed to a JSON based syntax and in
the circumstances where that makes sense here is the reasons to 
go for that as a MUST.

• two syntaxes are a lot more work to do than 0 - because JSON-LD
 would essentially remove the need to do anything more on syntax.
 This will save the Working Group a lot of time - a lot more than
 for example a healthy debate on use cases would have. 
  Even one syntax is a lot of work. The Atom working group lasted well
 over two years because of debates about what things would be attributes
 or elements, etc, etc... ie a load of syntactic issues that we can skip
 over quickly leaving us with the already difficult logical issues.

• it makes implementations easier: they no longer have to implement two
 parsers: one JSON-LD and a JSON one.

• we get Linked Data principles out of the box with JSON-LD, which means
 it will work well with other frameworks such as html data annotations etc,
 and we are distributed from the ground up

• we can make sure the data modelling is good by using tools and experience
which have been developed over 15 years in Universities, Governments, Companies
etc. around the world.

• we tie in with the Linked Data Platform that just recently made JSON-LD a
must support

• support for JSON-LD is growing fast


All of this does not stop people in a seperate group having a JSON pure syntax
and writing an mapper for that to the JSON-LD using a tool such as Antonio
Garrotes https://github.com/antoniogarrote/json-ld-macros . But the group here
does not need to spend time on solving a problem that does not need solving -
ie that has already been solved for us by JSON-LD. There are a lot of highly 
paid engineers here and we can't afford to waste their time.

Henry


> 
>  yours,
>     harry

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2014 16:05:33 UTC