Noah

> “I thought Al Gore invented the Internet?”

I know you’re poking fun, but it’s really worth setting the record straight. In 2007 I had the privilege of participating as a speaker at an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of NSFNet NSFNet is the acknowledged precursor of today’s Internet, and as you can see from the program, most of the big names in Internet history were there (Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, etc., etc.).

Someone made the Al Gore joke, and the response from several of the noteworthy speakers was: “look, almost nobody in the US Government did what Al Gore did to promote the success of the Internet. He drove hearings at a time when others didn’t appreciate the significance, and helped to put in place funding that helped build much of the infrastructure.” According to Snopes, what Gore actually said was:

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

As far as I know, that’s true, and it’s gratefully acknowledged by those who did create the technical standards for the Internet’s infrastructure.

Noah

You have just cemented some thoughts I’ve been having over the past few days. I’ve been shooting 35mm for almost 50 years now. Argus C4 (sic) to Mamiya-Sekor 500DTL to N6006 to D70.

I’m finally pulled the trigger on a D700 two weeks ago, and have been pondering the myriad focusing options I now have to choose from.

I was reaching the conclusion I’ve gotten lazy in my shooting habits, and the D700 was making it worse, then I started to read about the AF-ON button.

You are absolutely right; letting the camera (smart as they are getting) choose the focus point is abandoning a key element of composing a great photo (aperture/shutter speed being the other we tend to let the electronics take over).

Thank you for putting it so cogently.

On the other hand, you imply that there’s no significant need to pass around things like resumes in messages, and I strongly disagree with that. It depends on the application.

Now, what I do think we’re finding is that for a great deal of what people are doing with Ajax today, what Norm calls “atomic” values do just fine. JSON is both lower overhead and a more natural fit with Javascript, so go ahead and use it. The community is, at least for the moment, voting for the more targeted, simpler, lower overhead solution that’s convenient for the 80% or 90% case, and perhaps less natural or capable for some others. As Norm says: [for those cases] “…JSON is the obvious choice. I don’t lose any sleep over that.”

Markup is good, but is it useful in a data packet? Or can we parse the markup at another layer of the application stack and not worry about it in the transport layer at all?

I would hate to see SGML and it’s derivatives go away, but I don’t see them as solving all problems either. The territory which JSON covers today is structured messages, where the focus is on the meta-data rather than the content of the message itself. Contrast JSON with SOAP and you win, contrast JSON with ODF for a document format and JSON will suck big time.

XML had become the RDBMS of the message-passing world, and that’s being fixed by JSON. Neither of them is bad in context.

My question pertained to using JSON in a message passing context, as opposed to trying to represent everything in the one true format.

(I think binary blobs in the context of wireless drivers, or images, where the knowledge of what the bits mean is left to some other piece of code. Human readability or lack thereof isn’t particularly important).

> But do we care about resumes as
> structured data or are we happy
> with sending binary blobs over
> the wire?

Well, first of all, let’s not emphasize binary, which suggests things like .doc. That can be useful, but if we’re comparing JSON and XML, both are text.

I suspect you’re asking: “do we care about resumes as structured data or as undifferentiated text”? Well, that obviously depends on your application, but for many many purposes when you’re dealing with resumes, shop manuals, insurance policies or legal documents you very much want to deal with the structure. Certainly, the structure is important to things like document management systems. It’s also very important for templated document systems, in which something like an insurance policy is manipulated programmatically, with fields (name of policy holder) filled into the running text, paragraphs included conditionally (e.g. only if the policy is for more than a certain amount, etc.) SGML and later XML became big deals in part because of the value of such marked up text. Furthermore, there are lots of interesting things you can do with XML word processor and spreadheet formats such as ODF and OOXML.

On the other hand, there may well be cases where you’re dealing mainly with the sorts of field-oriented data that JSON is good at, with just an occasional need to carry around something like an HTML fragment as an opaque string (e.g. for an error message or even a form fragment.) If that meets your needs, fine, but do note that even that HTML is marked up text, no matter how opaque it is to the JSON. All that HTML out there should be a pretty big hint that marked up text is indeed very important.