I woke up Wednesday morning, and the much anticipated snowstorm hadn't amounted to much yet. The local media have a bad habit of hyping the snowfall, you you learn to ignore most of the weather forecast. Once I got into work, it became clear pretty quickly that this storm was for real. I did a pretty good job on the roads home around noontime, but my car came to grief in my driveway... not so bad, considering that many of my neighbors are still stranded on MLK Blvd. somewhere.
Lots of talk over the last couple days about JSON. I spent a lot of time shovelng snow over the last two days, which gave me ample time to think about the shortcomings of this approach. Tim Bray is right on about encoding; a conformant XML parser saves you a lot of encoding headaches. With JSON, you're pretty much relying on the server to tell the truth about the encoding, which is sort of like playing the lottery, only you don't get millions of dollars for getting a correct guess. I think that Tim oversimplifies on his "Use XML" points - I think that XML allows much more arbirtary structures than JSON, but I don't think "Just Use XML" is necessarily an answer.
