Serialization: friendly or unfriendly properties?

[davaya]

IBM coined the term "unfriendly" for serializations that use repeated constant property names, and "friendly" where property names directly identify the property. For example, an unfriendly email header would be:

"header": [
  {"header_name": "from", "value": "joe@foo.com"},
  {"header_name": "to", "value", "fred@acme.org"}
]

The friendly alternative uses names to directly identify values:

"header": {
  "from": "joe@foo.com",
  "to": "fred@acme.org"
}

In SPDX this affects the serialization of types such as Hash ("algorithm", "hashValue") and NamespaceMap ("prefix", "namespace"). The logical model is unaffected; this issue concerns only serialization.

The unfriendly serialization of NamespaceMap is:

"namespace": [
  {"prefix": "acme", "namespace": "http://sboms.acme.org"}
]

and the friendly version is:

"namespace": {
  "acme": "http://sboms.acme.org"
}

Proposal: where repeated constant property names appear in lists of the form {"tag": x, "value": y} pairs, serialize them as object properties {x: y}.

Decision: ?

[kestewart]

This needs to be sorted for 3.0

[goneall]

To be considered as part of any simple JSON proposal. Moving to 3.1