The github for this project doesn't use this terminology, but the keyword here is '
canonicalization'. That's the process in which you transform a document which can take any number of forms to a specific document that only takes one form.
You do this to ensure that documents that contain the same "information" will look identical on the wire, not just after-the-fact once you've processed them into some execution-specific data structure.
For example, X.509 certificates use ASN.1 DER, a restricted subset of ASN.1 BER where each value takes a deterministic form, so that two certificates that contain the same information will look identical when serialized into bytes. This is a stricter application of ASN.1, while, say, when you talk to a directory service over LDAP, you can speak BER, the looser encoding, because the exact bytes by which you're making yourself understood don't really matter.
Son is a canonicalized form of JSON, and the author maintains a page of JSON subsets and supersets [1] that lists two other canonicalized encodings, both of them containing silly flaws in their design. Son is a better effort.
[1] https://housejeffries.com/page/7
You do this to ensure that documents that contain the same "information" will look identical on the wire, not just after-the-fact once you've processed them into some execution-specific data structure.
For example, X.509 certificates use ASN.1 DER, a restricted subset of ASN.1 BER where each value takes a deterministic form, so that two certificates that contain the same information will look identical when serialized into bytes. This is a stricter application of ASN.1, while, say, when you talk to a directory service over LDAP, you can speak BER, the looser encoding, because the exact bytes by which you're making yourself understood don't really matter.
Son is a canonicalized form of JSON, and the author maintains a page of JSON subsets and supersets [1] that lists two other canonicalized encodings, both of them containing silly flaws in their design. Son is a better effort.
[1] https://housejeffries.com/page/7