How does it deal with XML-->JSON for deep mixed content? I have TEI
documents with analytic markup, on which the publisher's rendering and
the user's linguistic or semantic analysis depends, nested up to 10
levels deep. I am under pressure from some quarters to "make the markup
simpler" by using JSON.
Sure, it's straightforward. Each XML element is a JSON array whose first element is the element name as a JSON string, whose second element is the attribute mapping as a JSON object, and whose remaining elements are the content as JSON strings
or arrays. The attribute mapping can be omitted if it is empty.
It's straightforward to produce a mapping that retains all the XML infoset (to your example, add namespaces, comments, PIs...). It's not straightforward to produce a mapping to JSON that is in any way "simpler" than the original, or that remotely resembles
the "natural" way of representing the same information in JSON.
For example,
<list><item>A</item><item>B</item></list>
would be naturally represented in JSON as {"list": ["A", "B"]}, not as ["list", ["item", "A"], ["item", "B"]].
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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