Douglas Crockford

JSON and Beyond

Why does the creator of JSON now consider `null` a mistake? Hear the story behind the format and discover what he's building to fix it.

JSON and Beyond
#1about 2 minutes

The origin story and design principles of JSON

JSON was created in 2001 as a minimal, textual, and JavaScript-subset data format to solve communication needs for single-page web applications, intentionally avoiding the complexity of XML.

#2about 4 minutes

The rise of JSON and the value of stability

A comparison of Google Trends data shows JSON's steady growth over XML, highlighting the importance of its stability and the advice to not introduce breaking changes.

#3about 4 minutes

Introducing the Misty project and Kim encoding

The new actor-based system "Misty" requires a more efficient data format than JSON, leading to the creation of Kim, a minimal variable-byte encoding that is more compact than UTF-8.

#4about 3 minutes

Introducing Nota, a new binary message format

Nota is a new binary message format designed for the Misty system that supports blobs, text, arrays, and records using a compact encoding with type codes and continuation bits.

#5about 3 minutes

Handling numbers and special symbols in Nota

Nota represents floating-point numbers with an integer coefficient and exponent for compactness and simplicity, and it includes special symbols like true, false, private, and system while intentionally omitting null.

#6about 2 minutes

Understanding Nota's purpose and its place alongside JSON

Nota is a specialized, non-human-readable binary format for the Misty system and is not intended to replace JSON, which remains valuable for its textual nature and interoperability.

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