At http://xml.coverpages.org/xmlApplications.html is a list of several
hundred application vocabularies developed using XML syntax: and in 2005
they stopped counting.
Is there a similar list for JSON? Not one that I'm aware of. If there
are standard interchange formats built on top of JSON, I would love to
know about them. If I were setting out today to develop something like
XBRL, I would be quite tempted to use JSON rather than XML in the hope
of making programming easier, but I think I would quickly discover a
lack of tools: tools for specifying the application-level format, tools
for validating and processing instances. And in the end, I'm not sure I
would have made anyone's life easier, because the complexity of handling
something like XBRL does not arise because XML is complex, but because
XBRL is complex; the way it's encoded at layer 6 is pretty well irrelevant.
As far as I can tell, JSON (like CSV) is used almost entirely for
private data interchange between consenting applications, not for
standardised data formats. (I'm pleased to be corrected if I am wrong).
Michael Kay
Saxonica
