Re: dropped Basic spec?

Brian, we discussed this on IRC yesterday, and the feeling was that due to basic consensus on the tenants of JSON-LD that concerns were addressed in the full spec, making the basic spec redundant.

Manu's attempt at JSON-LD Basic was intended to address complexity issues in the full spec, perhaps were conflated with a basic mis-understanding of the goals of JSON-LD, and with the definition of "Linked Data". By removing any explicit use of RDF in the JSON-LD spec (other than the RDF conversion, of course), I believe we've addressed a number of these issues. Also, maintaining one spec is difficult enough, two would be even more difficult. If we were to do anything, it might be to remove the RDF conversion bits to a separate spec (JSON-LD+RDF); this has been suggested for Microdata, as well, so there is some precedent, but the RDF conversion pieces don't take up too much space, and the intended audience is pretty clear.

Regarding complexity, we need to consider the audience. I think that JSON-LD implementations will pretty much need to implement most of the spec (although normalization, expansion, and framing could be considered to be optional bits by an implementation, IMO). I think the basic spec was really targeted at publishers, to give them an easy way into it. Other than algorithmic descriptions, the main things in the advanced spec, not in the basic spec was chaining, multi-valued properties and typed-literals. If people think this necessary, we could move these to "Advanced Concepts", or include more in the introduction about basic use.

Having a separate "Basic" spec also leads to problems of misinterpretation of full-spec documents by basic processors, which I think would be a bad idea.

The HTML5 editors approach the problem of multiple audiences by automatically deriving the end-user focused spec from that needed for implementers. This is also something we could consider, but I think it adds unnecessary complexity.

We should discuss this on tomorrow's teleconference.

Gregg

On Aug 7, 2011, at 7:40 PM, Brian Peterson wrote:

I noticed that the Basic spec has been dropped. Is it being rolled into the main specification somehow? I perused the latest but didn’t see anything that specifically addressed the concerns and issues that the JSON Basic was meant to address.

BP