Re: Final Proposed Text for Liaison to IETF re: JSON

On 21/11/2013, at 12:49 AM, Appelquist Daniel (UK) <Daniel.Appelquist@telefonica.com> wrote:

> 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

Well, I said it was one of your options...

> 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.

This looks like a good expression of the concerns in the discussion I heard.

Cheers,


--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Wednesday, 20 November 2013 22:50:43 UTC