On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 11:43 AM, Noah Slater <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 06:40:44PM +0200, Ayende Rahien wrote: >> I think that this should be pretty easily done using: >> a) well defined pretty format output >> b) standard diff >> >> The reason for (a) is that you need this to get line breaks, which are >> critical to diffing correctly. > > It's a bit more complex than that, canonicalised JSON is still in it's > infancy, > so we would have to get the community to adopt that first. I know that people > have been discussing JSON diffs before, may be worth looking up what's already > been done on this. > > -- > Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater >
I think the JSON diff is a great idea. Unfortunately, the RFC is a bit worrisome in one respect: Section 2.2: 'The names within an object SHOULD be unique.' I think that this could be a pretty big stumbling block if different parsers start taking different interpretations of that and I've alread seen implementations do slightly different things with repeated field names. Contemplating the canonical spec I think I would prefer updating the JSON spec's use of SHOULD to MUST. The canonical thing to me seems more like a normalization method as opposed to a hard and fast spec. Specifically I could see lots of wasted cycles spent on keeping canonization when it's needed relatively infrequently. Assuming the change to MUST, I could probably write and implement a first draft of the spec in a day. How hard can it be to change an RFC? Paul
