Subject: [Json] Effects of changing JSON on existing specifications

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2013 12:19:15 +0100

I recently reviewed draft-ietf-appsawg-json-merge-patch and I stumbled
over some text that didn't make sense until I realized that it was
assuming RFC 4627 JSON.  That text can easily be fixed (and the
missing specification text generated in kind).  But it made me wonder
whether we have a little piece of "unscheduled work" here.

Now that we are changing JSON, we need to check for the impact of this
change on other IETF specs.

The effect of the changes can be:

-- spec breaks horribly, no repair (rare, I hope)
-- spec breaks, but there is an obvious fix
   -> can be documented in an informal way up to a revision
-- spec breaks, and there is at more than one conceivable fix
   -> it needs to be documented which one should be chosen
-- spec is fine.

I'm not trying to be Phil Nesser here (some people in this community
have done the Y2K search work that culminated in RFC2626 and we need
to do that, too — on a much smaller scale and without generating an
RFC, I hope).

So a quick check of the RFCs yields this list of grep hits (annotated
with my hypotheses, if I have any):

Grep hits:

-- RFC 4627.  Taken care of :-)
** RFC 5552, defines a way to put JSON in a URI.  Needs check.
-- RFC 6202, uses JSONP.
-- RFC 6208, several CDMI media types (specified externally) use JSON.
++ RFC 6231, talks about "complex ECMAScript value" only, probably OK
-- RFC 6392, just mentions that JSON will be used.
++ RFC 6415, defines JRD as a single JSON object.  Fine.
-- RFC 6573, mentions Collection+JSON.
++ RFC 6749, seems to be a single JSON object (called a JSON structure here).  Fine.
-- RFC 6819, mentions JWT.  Fine.
-- RFC 6839, defines +json (and thinks UTF-8 JSON is 8bit compatible, oops).
** RFC 6901, defines JSON pointer.  Any fix needed is probably obvious.
** RFC 6902, defines JSON patch.  Any fix needed is probably obvious.
++ RFC 6962, defines log messages as JSON objects.  Should be fine.
-- RFC 7009, mentions JSONP.
++ RFC 7033, defines JRD as a JSON object.  Fine.
++ RFC 7049, defines a mapping from and to JSON.  Seems fine.
-- RFC 7069, mentions JSON for CDMI.
++ RFC 7071, defines a reputon as a JSON object.  Should be fine.
-- RFC 7072, mentions RFC 7071.

I haven't checked the RFC editor queue or any other I-Ds.

It would be best it the authors of these specs did a quick check.
This needs to be coordinated and the results collected in some form.

Grüße, Carsten