On Jul 11, 2017, at 06:14, J Decker <[email protected]> wrote: > > Why does JSON have quoted field names anyway (which I could understand if > they included spaced).
Douglas Crockford has explained this bit of history in talks about JSON: Originally, they weren’t quoting map keys (names of object members) if they looked like identifiers in JavaScript. (In early JavaScript-based implementations, JSON data was directly fed as code into the JavaScript interpreter so there was no need to write a decoder.) But then some application was using “do” as a map key. “do” happens to be a reserved word in JavaScript, breaking the decoding process. So they had to check if the map keys were reserved words and quote them in that case. That set then would have to become part of the JSON specification. Worse, the set of reserved word in JavaScript could (theoretically) change, so either the JSON specification would need to change, too, or the next version of JavaScript would no longer support direct use of JSON as JavaScript code. So they decided to simply always quote, and that was that. The approach to execute JSON as JavaScript code of course is history now, but JSON hasn’t changed back. Actually, with RFC 7159 and ECMA 404 out and JSON very widely implemented, any proposal to change the JSON syntax is a complete non-starter. (Most of these proposals come from people who notice that JSON is bad for conversing about data or for human input. Well, that is not what JSON is meant for. DO NOT USE JSON FOR CONVERSING ABOUT DATA OR FOR HUMAN INPUT. JSON is an interchange format. There are much better formats for humans inputting and conversing about JSON-modeled data, such as YAML, which is even a superset of JSON. No point in messing around with JSON if the problem has already been solved.) Of course, if saving bytes is your objective, you might want to look at CBOR. I wonder when that is picked up by the JavaScript spec (there are libraries, of course). Grüße, Carsten _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
