
Amazon Ion - drnewman
http://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/
======
olliej
I really wish things like this wouldn’t call themselves “a superset of X”.

It’s a different data format, that happens to overlap JSON, and while
technically that makes it a superset, that’s not what the actual result is.

For example: is calling a plain text file a “superset of xml” a useful claim
to make?

I’m also not sure I understand the purpose of this or what it is trying to
solve - everything it has clonked on to “Json” already exists in a much more
clearly standardized way in xml. XML also has numerous production quality
parsers, and a huge ecosystem. The only thing it’s missing is a compact binary
form - that would be a reasonable argument for a new structured data format.
But instead what they’ve done is published a new “plain text Json superset”
that /just happens/ to have a binary serialisation.

~~~
rahimnathwani
"I’m also not sure I understand the purpose of this or what it is trying to
solve"

From the 'why' page, it sounds like a middle ground between JSON (max
flexibility) and protocol buffers (max efficiency of network bandwidth and
parsing workload): [http://amzn.github.io/ion-
docs/guides/why.html](http://amzn.github.io/ion-docs/guides/why.html)

------
rahimnathwani
Previous discussion (on the launch announcement):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11546098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11546098)

(And not to be confused with the earlier ION project which does something
similar.)

