Final Proposed Text for Liaison to IETF re: JSON

Please see below for some final proposed text for a liaison statement to
IETF regarding the issues we are discussing with JSON, as proposed by Mark
Nottingham last week.  Thanks to Tim Bray and Martin Dürst for the
feedback which I think I’ve addressed.  Let’s agree the final wording on
tomorrow’s TAG call after which I propose that we request the W3C liaison
(Wendy and / or Philippe) to ship to over to IETF (in addition to the
substantive cross-posted discussion currently going on).

Thanks,
Dan

--
The W3C Technical Architecture Group has a concern regarding the ongoing
coordination of the industry standardization work on JSON.  JSON is a key
integration technology for Web applications and a key data interchange
format for the Web.  The current state of affairs, where there are now two
different JSON specifications which may be normatively referenced, one
developed in ECMA as ECMA-404 and one developed in IETF as RFC-4627 and in
last call as RFC-4627bis is not ideal and could lead to confusion in the
industry.  We believe that this could  lead to interoperability issues.
Because the two specs vary slightly, we believe this could lead to
interoperability issues.

For example, today there are JSON parsers (conforming to ECMA-404) that
can parse "42" (a JSON document consisting of a single integer). There are
also parsers (conforming to RFC 4627/draft-ietf-json-rfc4627bis-07) that
cannot parse "42" today, but they can be meaningfully upgraded to do so
too. This would not break applications using those parsers, unless they
depend on parsing "42" as an error, which is a far more unlikely scenario
than parsing it as 42 given precedence.

Regardless of the historical reasons for the current situation, the W3C
TAG believes that having one definition of JSON would be beneficial for
the Web and for the wider community of JSON implementors and JSON
consuming and producing applications.  We suggest that the IETF JSON
working group should re-enter discussions with ECMA TC39 in order to
facilitate aligning RFC-4627bis with the current ECMA-404 specification.
--

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2013 13:50:15 UTC