JSON and the I'll-go-nuts#

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:21:02 +0000

So, not regularly reading the usual techweenie web blogs leaves me several months late to this particular party, but apparently Dave Winer whines about JSON including the assertion that it "proposes to solve a problem that was neatly solved by XML-RPC in 1998"

This is laughable. (I laughed, so it must be). The difference between JSON and XMLRPC - quite apart from any arguments from elegance, lightness of weight, ease of parsing in javascript, etc - is that the author of JSON wrote an actual specification that defined it, whereas the author of XMLRPC was either unable or unwilling to do so, instead providing us with some random stream-of=consciousness excuse for same. See e.g. the ASCII issue - frankly it's the same kind of imprecision and sloppy writing that got us the RSS ('Really Seven Standards' mess.

(Also, JSON can represent Null objects out of the box, which is a big help to those of us who work with languages where Null and "the empty string" are distinct concepts.)