Subject: [Json] Nudging the English-language vs. formalisms discussion forward

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 16:23:43 -0800

It's been a week, and yet I can't imagine that everything has been said with respect to our proposed charter item that now stands at:

   A set of natural-language terms and/or phrases for use in future specifications
   that use JSON. This explicitly excludes schema languages and similar formalisms.

After that, a bunch of people started talking about formalisms and actual schemas again. In order to get this decided, we need more discussion and then agreement. To that end, and to put our 90 minutes on Friday afternoon in London to best use, I will ask for at least three people to present their views in 10-minute presentations at the meeting. However, in order to cause this to not be the normal IETF "let's wait for the meeting" game, the presentations need to be done by next Monday, Feb. 24. That gives people on the list a preview of what will be said, time to argue about it, and time for the presenters to hone their slides if they want.

Let me know online or offline if you want to do a presentation. If you're not going to be at the meeting but want to say something, you need to find some like-minded soul with whom to work on the presentation.

--Paul Hoffman

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:59:08 -0500

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]> wrote:

> It's been a week, and yet I can't imagine that everything has been said
> with respect to our proposed charter item that now stands at:
>
> After that, a bunch of people started talking about formalisms and actual
> schemas again. In order to get this decided, we need more discussion and
> then agreement. To that end, and to put our 90 minutes on Friday afternoon
> in London to best use, I will ask for at least three people to present
> their views in 10-minute presentations at the meeting. However, in order to
> cause this to not be the normal IETF "let's wait for the meeting" game, the
> presentations need to be done by next Monday, Feb. 24. That gives people on
> the list a preview of what will be said, time to argue about it, and time
> for the presenters to hone their slides if they want.
>
> Let me know online or offline if you want to do a presentation. If you're
> not going to be at the meeting but want to say something, you need to find
> some like-minded soul with whom to work on the presentation.
>

I have a tool that I would like to present.

The input to the tool is an abstract description of a data structure, the
output is code that generates JSON serializer and deserializer code from
the description and xml2rfc or html text that describes the interpretation
of the data structure.

All the code and reference material in the following document were
generated with the tool

http://tools.ietf.org/search/draft-hallambaker-wsconnect-05

The advantage of working this way is that if a change is made to the
specification it will automatically make its way into the examples and the
reference material. So if someone decides that the tag should be "DateTime"
rather than "Date" you can edit one field in one file and be confident that
the changes are reflected through all the examples. No more hunting through
the examples to make sure that all the changes were made consistently.

The code is on SourceForge and an update I am working on provides code in C
as well as C#.

The abstract description is not in JSON. This is deliberate, I find JSON to
be rather noisy as a text entry format. Plus you might face what we saw in
the KEYPROV working group where the core spec was in one format (XML) but
another group of people wanted to do ASN.1 because thats what the rest of
crypto is done in. It would be very easy to dump out ASN.1 and XML schemas
from the same tool. All that is required is a new output script to generate
the other schema language.

I do however have a flight out of LHR at 16:00 so I have constraints..

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 19:16:15 -0600

My advice:

a) welcome WG work items for specifying one or more Informational JSON schemas,

b) recommend (not RFC2119 RECOMMEND) the use of a JSON schema when
specifying applications using JSON, if appropriate -- a schema of the
application spec authors' choosing.

Nico
--

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 17:36:29 -0800

On Feb 17, 2014, at 4:59 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]> wrote:

> . . .

Thanks for volunteering, and we'll put you first.

--Paul Hoffman

---

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 21:10:17 -0500

> application spec authors' choosing.

+1

I would prefer standards track to be limited to actual protocols and
mandatory to implement features of protocols. We don't need to agree on the
schema unless it goes over the wire.

I really want to avoid getting to the point where we pass JSON schemas or
references to schema over the wire like we do with .xsd. That does
absolutely no good in any situation I am aware of.

One other point, I was needing a quick HTTP client for a part of an app so
I just realized I can adjust my JSON schema tool to generate code to parse
headers in a HTTP response. It is a little messier than JSON parsing as
HTTP headers are not quite as regular as JSON. But it is quite easy to
avoid messing with EBNF with a few hints to give the variant of the
encoding.

[Of course I since my Web Services are JSON data in a HTTP wrapper, having
JSON data in a JSON wrapper is quite attractive. More attractive still is
JSON-C encoding on the inner and outer wrappers. Thus finessing both
HTTP/2.0 and CORE]

---

From: Andrew Newton <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 21:39:26 -0500

I wouldn't mind 10 minutes to explain the motivations behind the JSON
Content Rules draft, many of which parallel some of the excellent
points that have been made in this thread.

-andy

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 7:23 PM, Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]> wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> json mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/json

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 19:11:19 -0800

> points that have been made in this thread.

Excellent, thanks! This discussion is getting fairly wide-ranging, so have one or two more short presentations in London might help people in the room catch up with some of the high points.

--Paul Hoffman