Dot notation to map AS 2.0 to POST parameters

I've been looking over the API brainstorming documents and I wanted to 
highlight a trick that I've seen used before for mapping structured 
names in JSON to flatter namespaces.

MongoDB uses it for querying document bases: 
http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/document/#dot-notation . There are a 
few JavaScript tools that do something similar for big JSON objects.

The trick is to name a field of a field using dot notation. So, an 
object like:

    {
         "@context":"http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
         "@type":"Create",
         "object": {
             "@type":"Note",
             "content":"Hello world!"
         }
    }

...could be coded as:

    @context=http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams&
    @type=Create&
    object.@type=Note&
    object.content=Hello world!

There are other such syntaxes -- JSON Pointer 
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6901>, for example -- but I like that 
the dot notation reflects the way a number of programming languages 
(JavaScript, Python, Ruby) do object attribute access.

If we can agree on something similar, it makes one of the big 
differences between micropub and the other two candidates a little 
easier to deal with.

-Evan

Received on Thursday, 25 June 2015 11:41:24 UTC