Re: [w3c/manifest] Use WebIDL to describe the manifest data structure (#611)

Well, I think it's not quite that amount of reuse. You're only using a small subset of Web IDL, i.e. the dictionaries/basic data types/sequences subset, ignoring the large swathes of the spec devoted to defining interfaces, global variables, methods, class hierarchies, etc. And the semantic content of that subset consists entirely of type coercion rules. But, you're not actually using any of the type coercion rules; you're instead using other rules that do not share very much of the logic at all. And you're using them on a very different set of inputs, since the output space of JSON.parse is a small subset of the total set of JS types, so whatever logic is left over, is not a great match.

As an example, on a page where `Object.prototype.short_name = "foo"`, using Web IDL would imply that parsing `{}` gives back a short name of `"foo"`, not `undefined`. Again, you could add yet another extended attribute to fix that, but...

I understand the motivation of wanting a readable, declarative syntax. I just think Web IDL, subsetted to a small piece of its semantics, with extended attributes to change all remaining behaviors of that subset, is ... not great. Maybe it's better than inventing your own thing, or reusing something like JSON schema. Indeed, maybe it's the best choice. But it's still not great.

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