Article:		JSON on the Web, or: The Revenge of SML
Subject:		Why JSON moves us forward
Date:		2006-07-11 01:05:44
From:		rjelliffe
JSON is useful because it stretches an existing format to reduce the syntactic and semantic gap between data and programs. Since SML did no attempt any of these, and since JSON did not come out SML, JSON is no more "the Revenge of SML" than it is "the Revenge of RTF." The revenge of IDL perhaps? Rick

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• Why JSON moves us away from XML - fortunately!
  2006-07-12 15:31:59 Simon St.Laurent [Reply]
  
  You seem to be splitting historical hairs to avoid a conclusion you never wanted to reach: that SML was a good idea, motivated by a mismatch between what programmers wanted to do with XML and what XML was offering.

  
  It's true that JSON isn't SML, and that YAML didn't feed directly into JSON. Nonetheless, YAML's emergence from SML and JSON's parallel development both seem to be recognition that maybe markup (ala SGML and XML) isn't the best way to share data between programs, and that other structures are often a better idea.

  
  I've long wanted programmers to work with something that fits their needs better than XML, as the efforts to make XML address data transfer have mostly created an incredible bloating. I had hopes for ASN.1 at various times, but JSON and YAML (for heavier-duty work) seem like the right answers to that set of problems in a way that XML, even XML augmented with zany Post-Schema-Validation-Infosets, can never be.
  
  

  • Why JSON moves us away from XML - fortunately!
    2006-07-24 19:19:59 rjelliffe [Reply]
    
    Sour grapes? Simon, don't make up bogus historical connections then complain if someone points that out! You titled your article "The Revenge of SML" as if JSON technically or historically has anything to do with SML.

    
    You are right that SML bifurcated into Common XML and YAML. But Common XML does not get rid of markup and so is nothing to do with JSON. And YAML, like JSON, has larger syntax and more object types than DTD-less XML: YAML (and JSON) ended up solving far different problems than were articulated for SML early.

    
    Indeed, that was the problem with SML wasn't it: aesthetic minimalists, interoperability fans, visual minimalists, low-power-device people and people who needed basic datatyping, got together under the banner of "simplicity" only to find that they actually needed other things: YAML for example is more complex than XML in its typing, and is not a markup language in the sense that non-SGML people think that a markup language means angle brackets.

    
    Why not say that JSON is revenge of SGML over XML, in the sense that it embodies a concern with terseness and desire for infix operators.
    
    

    • Why JSON moves us away from XML - fortunately!
      2006-07-24 20:21:00 Simon St.Laurent [Reply]
      
      I dunno, Rick - it seems to me that JSON proves that the SML people had a point in the first place, and that the YAML people who followed them had an even better point.

      
      I don't care much whether it's angle brackets or curly braces. I'm just happy that people who just want to ship data structures around have found a home more appropriate to them than XML ever really could be.

      
      (And with luck, JSON's success will lead more people to YAML, and eventually we'll have people working in toolsets that were actually designed for their tasks instead of repurposed from another field.)