RE: JSON-LD grammar

On Monday, January 07, 2013 7:30 PM, Gregg Kellogg wrote:

> AFAIK, W3C standard is EBNF, and I did make an attempt at an EBNF
> grammar some time ago, but the consensus of the group was that this
> wasn't too useful. The fact that it's JSON, and pretty much every
> implementation will use a JSON parser and iterate of the resulting
> objects, I still think this is probably not too useful for the purposes
> of implementing a processor.

Right. That's the reason why I didn't use EBNF. I wouldn't like to include
rules to parse JSON itself, just the grammar on top of JSON but
unfortunately there doesn't exist such a thing yet.


> However, I can see that laying out different node types, and what the
> expected key/value pairs that can be expected. As you note, we do this
> in prose now, but something that is more visual might be easier for
> people to understand. For this purpose, we can probably invent our own
> nomenclature, as long as it's consistent and light-weight. What you
> have below is pretty easy to understand, IMO.

That's the intent behind it. While you are implementing a JSON-LD processor,
validator, linter etc. you probably quite often need to check what's allowed
and what's not. Reading through prose isn't really productive and you risk
missing some details. That's why I tried to come up with something more
formal and condensed.


Cheers,
Markus



--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler