Preliminary Community Review: text/json

[Martin Duerst]

At 09:14 06/02/10, Graham Klyne wrote:

 >There is one other thing I noticed.  The proposed MIME type is text/json.  I
 >think that, based on comments I have seen made previously, that application/json
 >would be more appropriate.  My understanding is that text/... is intended for
 >textual information that is suitable for display to a general human audience;
 >e.g., it has been suggested that text/html was a mistake, which should not be
 >repeated.

I agree with Graham and others. I have looked at the spec. The fact
that it contains 'text' 12 times, but 'application' 0 times is a result
of the particular use of the word 'text' in the spec, which does not
match the use of the word 'text' in MIME types.

One additional comment regarding section 3, encodings. The spec says:

 >>>>
3. Encoding

    JSON text SHOULD be encoded in Unicode. The default encoding is
    UTF-8.

    Since the first two characters of a JSON text will always be ASCII
    characters [RFC-0020], it is possible to determine if an octet stream
    is UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE or LE), or UTF-32 (BE or LE) by looking at the
    pattern of nulls in the first four octets.

            00 00 00 xx  UTF-32BE
            00 xx 00 xx  UTF-16BE
            xx 00 00 00  UTF-32LE
            xx 00 xx 00  UTF-16LE
            xx xx xx xx  UTF-8
 >>>>

This is almost okay. What is unclear is whether other encodings
(e.g. iso-8859-1) are okay or not. If they are okay, that should be
said, and it should be explained how they can be identified.
If they are not okay, that should be said, too. I'd prefer that.
Simply adding a sentence saying something like "Other encodings
than UTF-8, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32BE or UTF-32LE MUST NOT
be used." should be okay.

It may also be worth to clarify that BOMs/encoding signatures
are not allowed.

Regards,    Martin.