On 2/4/2022 9:42 AM, Gary Gregory wrote:
Say what you will about XML, JSON is just reinventing the wheel. How do you transform a JSON document into another JSON document or into a PDF? With Jolt? Good luck. XML and XSLT, XML Schema, and on.

I quite agree. I understand why folks wanted an easier-to-parse, data-centered rather than document-centered, syntax. But the XML Data Model could easily handle JSON, so they *could* have stayed within the XML ecosystem and leveraged all our previous effort. The two should have been co-evolving rather than in direct competition. Instead the JSON folks were defensively dogmatic about "JSON isn't XML" and decided to repeat the evolution from scratch. Which has done them no favors; last I looked, they were still having trouble even agreeing upon a single path syntax (and were still unwilling to accept that ours might address their needs).

We *could* add JSON parser and generators to the XML space by defining a standard mapping between the two notations. The one thing I can think of that might be difficult is that JSON can express general graphs, not just trees, so a naive mapping would have some risk of unintended recursion. On the other hand, most JSON is a simple tree, and programs/stylesheets written with an awareness of that risk can either avoid provoking it or set a maximum-depth panic... It'd be a good 90/10 solution while we consider whether there's a cleaner way to handle it. Not as robust as I'd like, but then again Parsed Entities present their own risk and are not as robust against recursion as I'd like.


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