It seems silly to see so much stuff being recast as JSON, both formally (standards like this one) and informally.
Growing up in the 80s, I was mostly too young to remember the rise of XML. (Or more: too young to care much about work around a data format.) Presumably a similar thing happened then? I.e. there were existing formal and ad-hoc standards for representing a variety of concepts, and entirely new formal and ad-hoc standards were created to represent the same concepts in XML?
Why not create standards around abstract representations of things, and then create standards for serializing those into concrete formats?! So then we'd already have e.g. Abstract-LD and XML-LD; and JSON-LD would be new. That seems less wasteful than throwing everything out when a different data representation format becomes the new hotness.
(Certainly we learn things about the abstract representations as time goes on. That could be handled by versioning. So maybe there'd be XML-LD 1.0 and 2.0, but JSON-LD would only exist in 2.0 form because nobody was interesting in doing the work to define the JSON serialization of Abstract-LD 1.0...)
Growing up in the 80s, I was mostly too young to remember the rise of XML. (Or more: too young to care much about work around a data format.) Presumably a similar thing happened then? I.e. there were existing formal and ad-hoc standards for representing a variety of concepts, and entirely new formal and ad-hoc standards were created to represent the same concepts in XML?
Why not create standards around abstract representations of things, and then create standards for serializing those into concrete formats?! So then we'd already have e.g. Abstract-LD and XML-LD; and JSON-LD would be new. That seems less wasteful than throwing everything out when a different data representation format becomes the new hotness.
(Certainly we learn things about the abstract representations as time goes on. That could be handled by versioning. So maybe there'd be XML-LD 1.0 and 2.0, but JSON-LD would only exist in 2.0 form because nobody was interesting in doing the work to define the JSON serialization of Abstract-LD 1.0...)