RE: Media type for JSON-LD: is it really a good idea?

Hi Ivan,


> Markus made a change on the pyRdfa processor the other day (which I
> propagated to the pyRdfa service on the W3C) to change the media type
> when distilling json-ld from RDFa. I realized yesterday that this
> 'broke' a feature I used: I have a JSON viewer/displayer extension in
> Firefox that did not work any more. The reason is obvious: that
> extension works on a /json media type but does not on /jsonld+json
> (probably ignores any YYYY+json in general).

Yes, I'm aware of that problem. The thing is that currently Firefox doesn't
provide an API to register extensions for MIME type ranges such as
application/*+json. If you are using JSONView I can send you a patched
version that works also with application/ld+json.


> Hence my question: do we have an idea how widely the '+' mechanism is
> implemented among tools that rely on media type? My _hunch_ is that
> this is not widely done (this was/is an issue with the YYYY+xml stuff
> as well).

I would say it is widely used but library support is still quite limited.
There's an ongoing effort to standardize the +json convention [1]. I do hope
that changes the situation to the better once it's out.


> Because the major value of JSON-LD is that existing JSON
> tools can happily work with it, possibly ignoring the 'LD' aspects, I
> wonder whether, in practice, it is not better not to introduce a new
> media type... Of course, if the experience is that YYYY+jsonld works in
> general, and only my extension has a bug then, well, o.k.
> 
> I am just musing here, not raising some sort of an objection...

That would just fix a specific symptom but not the underlying problem and
has some serious downsides. If we would do that, than there wouldn't be any
way to detect if the response was JSON-LD or not without content sniffing.
It would also make it impossible for clients to specifically request JSON-LD
in content negotiation. Furthermore it become a problem if JSON-LD specific
development tools became available.

I have been working on something related [2] recently but haven't had time
yet to transform that into a browser plugin. It's definitely on my todo
list.

Just go to [2] and click on the link at the bottom to load a JSON-LD
document. When you move your mouse over any property or value a tooltip
showing you the IRI it would expand to appears. The IRI is also dereferenced
in the background on the corresponding documentation is shown. This is still
an early prototype - so don't expect too much :-)


Let me know if you want the patched JSONView version in the meantime.


[1]
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-media-type-suffix-regs-08#sect
ion-3.1
[2] https://m.lanthi.com/HydraConsole


Cheers,
Markus



--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Monday, 10 December 2012 14:47:07 UTC