If I'm going to do HTML that isn't HTML then I might as well not do HTML, there's a lot of sharp edges in that particular markup that I'd prefer to avoid.
> Why aren't you worried about badly formatted JSON?
Because the json spec is much smaller than the HTML spec so it is much easier for the parser to prevalidate and reject invalid JSON.
Maybe I need to reread the paper and substitute "a good hypermedia language" for HTML conceptually, see if it makes more sense to me.
Fielding's thesis barely mentions HTML (20 times), and usually in the context of discussing standards or why JS beat Java applets, but he discusses hypermedia quite a bit (over 70 times).
If you extended JSON so that URLs (or URIs) were first-class, something like:
it would form a viable hypermedia format because then you can reliably distinguish references from other forms of data. I think the only reason something like this wasn't done is that Crockford wanted JSON to be easily parsable by existing JS interpreters.You can workaround this with JSON schema to some extent, where the schema identifies which strings are URLs, but that's just way more cumbersome than the distinction being made right in the format.