Design Principles for CSL JSON

[Bruce_D_Arcus1]

@Frank_Bennett

parsing from plain text and juggling metadata fields are two very different tasks, and they could be separately specified. Just as EDTF provides a separate standalone specification of the syntax of date elements, it should be possible to cast a text parsing specification that sets out the structures that should be generate-able from parsing operations. That would then guide the development of syntax, whether kinda-sorta-HTML or something else. It is the markup capabilities that matter, not the HTML-ness or Markdown-ness of the markup, nor the JSON-ness or YAML-ness of structured output.

In the experimental solution we settled on, the result is a native JSON data structure; the unambiguous target for any parsing.

Aside: these days, YAML and JSON are effectively interchangeable. Our JSON schemas can validate a YAML variant.

So despite the syntax differences, we’re saying for csl processors, rich text is a nested array of strings and formatted objects.

In YAML:

title:
  - A title with tex math
  - math-tex: x=y^2

This is also valid though:

title: A title

But, there’s a reason I marked it “experimental”: we need feedback.