Re: [JSON] I say again, what *is* JSON?

From: Nathan <nathan@webr3.org>
Subject: Re: [JSON] I say again, what *is* JSON?
Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:36:50 -0500

> Gavin Carothers wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Peter Frederick Patel-Schneider
>> <pfps@research.bell-labs.com> wrote:
>>> Hmm.
>>>
>>> Is this really the JSON spec?
>> 
>> No.
> 
> This was referring to the ECMAScript-262 specification [1].
> 
> No it's not the JSON specification, however it is closely related, "JSON 
> is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript" [2], 

Apparently not so.  I see [1, p202] as saying differently

	JSON [...] allows Unicode code points U+2028 and U+2029 to
 	directly appear in JSONString literals without using an escape
 	sequence.  

which, by the way, appears to contract the information following about
how to parse JSON.

> and was 
> developed when ECMAScript-262 was in it's Third Edition. ECMAScript-262 
> is now in it's Fifth Edition, and includes JSON.

Well, includes something that might (or might not) be related to JSON.

> To all extents and purposes, the JSON people use, and the environment 
> they often use it in, is defined by the ECMAScript-262 Fifth Edition I 
> referred you to.
>
> For practical usage, and when discussing, it's good to be familiar with 
> the ECMAScript-262 Fifth Edition and what it says about JSON, the 
> parsing and stringification of it, and how it maps to ECMAScript-262 
> "Objects".
>
> Hope that clarifies.

Not very well.  To understand JSON this way is extraordinarily difficult
and expensive, requiring deep knowledge of the innards of EMCAScript.

> [1] 
> http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-262.pdf
> [2] http://www.json.org/js.html

peter

Received on Thursday, 24 March 2011 17:16:30 UTC