On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 1:57 PM, Houghton,Andrew <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > A way to fix this issue is to say that use cases #1 and #2 conform to > media type application/json and use case #3 conforms to a new media type > say: application/marc+json. This new application/marc+json media type now > becomes a library centric standard and it avoids breaking a widely deployed > Web standard. > I'm so sorry -- it never dawned on me that anyone would think that I was asserting that a JSON MIME type should return anything but JSON. For the record, I think that's batshit crazy. JSON needs to return json. I'd been hoping to convince folks that we need to have a standard way to pass records around that doesn't require a streaming parser/writer; not ignore standard MIME-types willy-nilly. My use cases exist almost entirely outside the browse environment (because, my god, I don't want to have to try to deal with MARC21, whatever the serialization, in a browser environment); it sounds like Andy is almost purely worried about working with a MARC21 serialization within a browser-based javascript environment. Anyway, hopefully, it won't be a huge surprise that I don't disagree with any of the quote above in general; I would assert, though, that application/json and application/mac+json should both return JSON (in the same way that text/xml, application/xml, and application/marc+xml can all be expected to return XML). Newline-delmited json is starting to crop up in a few places (e.g. couchdb) and should probably have its own mime type and associated extension. So I would say something like: application/json -- return json (obviously) application/marc+json -- return json application/marc+ndj -- return newline-delimited json In all cases, we should agree on a standard record serialization, though, and the pure-json returns should include something that indicates what the heck it is (hopefully a URI that can act as a distinct "namespace"-type identifier, including a version in it). The question for me, I think, is whether within this community, anyone who provides one of these types (application/marc+json and application/marc+ndj) should automatically be expected to provide both. I don't have an answer for that. -Bill-