Need any more proof that Dave Winer’s just making shit up as he goes along?
Dave Winer on JSON on Dec. 20, 2006:
God bless the re-inventers
Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.
I’ve been hearing, off in the distance, about something called JSON, that proposes to solve a problem that was neatly solved by XML-RPC in 1998, the encoding of arrays and structs in a format that could easily be processed by all programming languages. …
Today I looked. I read on Niall Kennedy that del.icio.us has come up with an API that returns a JSON structure, and I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML!
As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?
No doubt I can write a routine to parse this, but look at how deep they went to re-invent, XML itself wasn’t good enough for them, for some reason (I’d love to hear the reason). Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this is why I’m fed up with Mountain View, Cupertino, Redwood Shores and Redmond. Give me Berkeley and New York any day. Silicon Valley is made up of little boys pulling their puds, constantly making love to each other, pretending the world revolves around them.
Winer a day later, after he was told that JSON was an existing part of JavaScript syntax, not a new invention:
So JSON isn’t evil. It’s just the internal object serialization format for JavaScript. No problem. But using it as a basis for interop, when there were already good ways to achieve interop is evil, imho. I don’t think that’s what del.icio.us did, but I do see some people advocating that, and I think they’re wrong.
Winer today:
Dave, if you could go back in time, would you have used JSON instead of XML for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, etc, had JSON been popularized at the time?
The reason I ask is that most of those protocols and formats don’t use much of the extras that XML is required for (schemas, namespaces, attributes, data escaping, etc). Simple key/value/dict/array/string/number structures would be sufficient in all those cases. If you could take a do-over, would you?
Great question! And if you look at how I use XML, you know the answer is yes. I have no love for XML, I thought it was over engineered, and too much was promised for it, but everyone wanted to do it, and that convinced me. …
That’s what I like about JSON, it has a low-techness to it, no fuss, no pretension.
So now JSON’s the format he would’ve used all along, in spite of the fact he called JSON advocates “little boys pulling their puds” and thought using it for interop would be “evil.”