Because I don’t actually enjoy watching football, during the Pats vs. Broncs game on Sunday I transposed the Oscar™ nominations into a JSON file. I did this very badly, but I did it. If you look at it, you’ll see just how badly I misunderstand JSON on some really basic levels.

But I posted it at GitHub™ where you can fix it if you care enough.

Why JSON™? Because it’s an easy format for inputting data into JavaScript™ or many other languages. It’s also human-readable, if you have a good brain for indents. (This is very different from having many indents in your brain, which is one reason I don’t particularly like to watch football™, even with the helmets and rules, etc.)

Anyway, JSON puts data into key:value™ pairs, and lets you nest them into sets. So, you might have a keyword such as “category” that would have values such as “Best Picture™” and “Supporting Actress™.” Within a category you might have a set of keywords such as “film_title” and “person” with the appropriate keywords.

JSON is such a popular way of packaging up data for transport over the Web™ that many (most? all?) major languages have built-in functions for transmuting it into data that the language can easily navigate.

So, why bother putting the Oscar™ nomination info into JSON? In case someone wants to write an app that uses that info. For example, if you wanted to create your own Oscar™ score sheet or, to be honest, entry tickets for your office pool, you could write a little script and output it exactly as you’d like. (Or you could just google™ for someone else’s Oscar™ pool sheet.) (I also posted a terrible little PHP script™ that does just that.)

So, a pointless™ exercise™ in truly terrible JSON design™. You’re welcome™!

Categories: tech dw