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Need use-cases section #8
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Updated the ED with current usage descriptions. Does this make sense to you? |
Since beginning the jf2 spec, I've continued developing XRay, and its format has diverged from the original jf2. Tonight I spent a while trying to reconcile the changes to submit a PR to the spec. I was unable to come up with a short PR, and instead got drawn in to thinking about the motivations behind a simpler mf2 JSON format to begin with. I use XRay in a number of projects for various purposes.
There are a number of things that XRay does when extracting the mf2 data.
As you can see, a lot of what XRay is doing is cleaning up some of the the "messy" parts of Microformats JSON. Not necessarily the specific JSON format, but more about the overall structure, such as how an author of a post can be in many different places in a parsed Microformats JSON object. This is not to place blame on Microformats, since what it's doing is creating a JSON representation of the original HTML, and allowing authors flexibility in how they publish HTML rather than prescribe specific formats is a core principle. What this means is XRay is actually acting more as an interpreter of the Microformats JSON, in order to deliver a cleaned-up version to consumers. Most of my projects that use XRay could actually be considered "clients", such as how I use XRay to parse posts for my reader, whether that's output to me in IRC or re-rendered as a post on IndieNews. My primary need for an alternative Microformats JSON format is actually a client-to-server serialization, where the client is getting a cleaned up version of external posts, and can assume that the server it's talking to is responsible for taking the messy data and normalizing it to something it expects. In this sense, the use case of jf2 is a client-to-server serialization, whereas the Microformats JSON is a server-to-server serialization. This would then be a core building block for Microsub, a spec that provides a standardized way for clients to consume and interact with feeds collected by a server. The main current challenge in defining a spec for this use case is how tied to specific vocabularies it should be. For example, Microformats JSON says that every value should always be an array. However, there are a few properties for which it never makes sense to have multiple values, and creates additional complexity in consuming it, e.g. I am just not sure how to balance wanting to provide that simplicity for consuming clients while also allowing flexibility in publishing, while also not hard-coding too much into a spec that might be obsoleted later. (originally published at https://aaronparecki.com/2017/04/24/15/jf2) |
As of last checking your usage matches the current JF2 spec. If it does not you can always open issues to that effect |
as that is a separate issue and the original question was dealt with some time ago, going to close as commenter timeout |
Would be great to see a use-cases section that lists (even briefly) reasons that motivated a simplified JSON representation, and any additional use-cases for which jf2 can be used for.
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