TSON – A JSON superset with immutable, hash-pinned schemas

>> Ordering, consensus, and mutability policy are application concerns outside this series. [1]

Of course, immutable means as-is, but since you're not dealing with ordering etc (that's pretty big), I might as well use existing tech (JSON with a schema) and a policy (simple/naive: hash and compare lowercased data).

[1] From their spec: 2.2.1 Identity and Content Addressing - https://tson.io/2026/32/tson-part1-data/#

Using the query string to carry the sha256 hash but then saying the "hash parameter is verification metadata, not identity" doesn't make much sense. The ?query part of a URL is supposed to be sent to the server. If you want to add client-side (meta)data, you should use the #fragment part of a URL. See RFC 3986, sections 3.4 and 3.5: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-3.4

What's the justification for being a superset of JSON? Being incompatible with most existing JSON tooling and interfaces is a big disadvantage, so there better be a tangible upside.

Also, I see mention of hashing, but no mention of canonicalization. Does fiddling with a schema's whitespace change its hash?

Seem to different from JSON to be an easy drop in, while still having the problems of json. I’d rather use something further away like cue.

you can just add schema to json why add new syntax now, especially for json I dont think it makes sense I honestly believe the war is over there won't be a xml to json moment unless we move to a new platform other than browsers which seem rather unlikely, json honestly is fine for something that's somewhat human readable...

I think I'm gonna go back to XSLT

Seems like it draws a lot of inspiration from EDN. Tagged literals, commas-as-whitespace (and optional), and anything-can-be-a-key are features I sorely miss when I have to go back to JSON.

Don't know how I feel about optional quotes around strings, that seems like a mistake. And having an immutable set literal would be nice as well.

when will be xson invented, with support of xpathson and xsdson but strictly leaving out other xml features.. for future improvement?

Sorry, but this tool is just never going to succeed being written in Java.

Hash-pinned schemas are definitely the right direction for ensuring verifiable provenance across distributed systems. Great concept!

If the author is here, the Github repo in https://litterat.io/ should be https://github.com/litterat

why can't you use hash pinned schemas with existing json? Why do you need a new format for it?

Absolute slop. Interesting that the end result, the place where Claude ended up, is similar to a (human-authored, windmill-tilting) project of mine, https://preserves.dev/ . Though with a much prettier website and far, far, far more words.

great another shitty JSON variant. now I'll have 9 different json-like libraries in every project that I can't get rid of.

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