Hacker News Reader

Comment by simplotek | Hacker News Reader

> It's always strange to think that we went through formats like XML (and even earlier, XDR) before inventing something as seemingly simple and obvious as JSON.

It's my understanding that JSON was not invented. It's just the necessary and sufficient parts of JavaScript to define data structures, and could be parsed/imported in a browser with a call to eval().

People who complain about JSON completely miss the whole point. It's not that it's great or trouble-free, it's that it solved the need to exchange data with a browser without requiring any library or framework.

View on HN

I don’t understand what you mean by JSON was not invented. It was invented by Douglas Crockford. Before he invented JSON, we used XML to pass data around the web. After he invented JSON, it took quite awhile to catch on. There were many years of transition where some web services would only send xml and others could send xml or json. Eventually all web services gave you the choice of which one it would send. And then, gradually, xml was transitioned out and everything was json.

> I don’t understand what you mean by JSON was not invented. It was invented by Douglas Crockford.

Douglas Crockford took his time to write up a specification for the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).

That specification is, quite literally, "based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999."

It's in the name. There is no way around this.

MDN's doc on JavaScript's eval() vs JSON.parse() refer to JSON as "a subset of JavaScript syntax to represent data."

Claiming that someone discovered JSON makes as much sense as reading the C standard section on struct initialization and proceed to claim you discovered the C struct notation (CSN).

https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/struct_initializati...

I don’t think that means it was not invented. Otherwise we would have had it years before. What I understand “based on a subset of JavaScript” to mean is, Crockford chose some of the JS data types (object, array, number, string) and invented a string representation of them that could be used as a data interchange format. That was revolutionary. I remember when I first learned about JSON. It felt like Crockford was a genius for coming up with it, and then wondering why nobody else had come up with it before him. There is no way we would have suffered through XML Hell for so many years I’d there had been another option. But there wasn’t another option. Why? Because Crockford hadn’t invented JSON yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com