Hacker News Reader

It's all fun until someone loses an eye.

What if i look at your API output and assume it's json (only got unique items) but it's rjson? Or whatever?

The most important thing when adding another layer to a protocol is identification.

So, please, put the whole altered object into a rjson root node so it's clear what we're dealing with.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this what Content-type is for?

I agree that identification is important issue, but IMO it's protocol level issue. RJSON is not protocol, it's algorithm. Someone will prefer to wrap all in {"rjson": ...}, someone like {"format": "rjson", "data": ...} and so on. I belive, algorithm itself should create as less limitations as possible.

The MIME type is allowed to add information about the nature of the data encoded on top of the encoding. This is why we have application/xhtml+xml. It means "this is encoded using xml, and btw the parsed xml structure is xhtml".

The ideal place to handle this is (as pointed out above) content negociation - specifically as 'application/rjson+json'

It's an algo. But the resulting data is a protocol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com