application/vnd.noark5-v4+json. What is it?

Petter Reinholdtsen pere at hungry.com
Fri Dec 2 12:01:32 CET 2016


[Thomas Sødring]
> One of the things that is bugging me is that I do not know what
> *vnd.noark5-v4+json* actually is.

It is probably not exactly what you are wondering about, but there is
some things we can derive from the fact that it is a MIME type.
"application/vnd." tell us that it is a vendor specific MIME type (ie
specific for a given product and not standardized with an open
standard), and the "+json" part tell us that it follow the JSON
specification.  This is what is defined by IETF/IANA, and I assume the
baseline for the output produced by NOARK5 implementations.

> I wonder am I being pedantic in that I would like to know what the
> actual strucutre the JSON should conform to? Are we potentially
> creating an interoperability problem where various vendors can
> structure their replies differently?

I have not read the specification in detail, but suspect that if the
details of the expected response do not mention exactly how the fields
should be coded in json, there might be an interoperability problem.  I
would expect client implementations to have code to handle the servers
its developers have seen, and if two servers return different output
structure the client might only work with one of them.

Then again there is the example web site refered to from the noark5
pages, which might make it easier to implement the same behaviour on all
servers.  It is not as good as a clear and consistent specification, but
it is better than having no example at all. :)

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen


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