Brain on Fire » Blog feed Tim McCormack says words

Proposal: JSON for scripting-ready page metadata

Automated disclaimer: This post was written more than 15 years ago and I may not have looked at it since.

Older posts may not align with who I am today and how I would think or write, and may have been written in reaction to a cultural context that no longer applies. Some of my high school or college posts are just embarrassing. However, I have left them public because I believe in keeping old web pages alive—and it's interesting to see how I've changed.

I'm proposing a new standard: 

var MetaData =
{
	"version":"0",
	"page":
	{
		"title":"Proposal: JSON for scripting-ready metadata.  No more theme-dependent HTML parsing -- just grab the needed data out of a namespaced global object.  Read on for details.



Adoption



Tools like coComment (which allows users to track their online conversations) need to parse data from the web page a user is visiting in order to enrich regular web pages with scripting-ready metadata/",
		"author":
		{
			"name":"Tim McCormack",
			"url":"https://www.brainonfire.net/"
	},
	"proprietary":
	{
		"cocomment":
		{
			"blogTool":"WordPress"
			"commentTextFieldName":"messageTextArea",
			"commentButtonName":"SubmitButton",
			"commentAuthorLoggedIn":true,
			"commentFormName":"commentForm"
		}
	}
};

Background

The site's name, for example.

var MetaData =
{
	"version":"0",
	"page":
	{
		"title":"Proposal: JSON for scripting-ready metadata/",
		"author":
		{
			"name":"Tim McCormack/"
		},
		"creationDate":"2006-08-04 15:10:39",
		"lastEditDate":"2006-08-06 7:23:06"
	},
	"site":
	{
		"title":"Brain on Fire",
		"url":"https://www.brainonfire.net/"
	},
	"proprietary":
	{
		"cocomment":
		{
			"blogTool":"WordPress"
			"commentTextFieldName":"messageTextArea",
			"commentButtonName":"SubmitButton",
			"commentAuthorLoggedIn":true,
			"commentFormName":"commentForm"
		}
	}
};

Adoption

I'm proposing a new standard: 

var MetaData =
{
	"version":"0",
	"page":
	{
		"title":"Proposal: JSON for scripting-ready page metadata",
		"url":"https://www.brainonfire.net/"
	},
	"proprietary":
	{
		"cocomment":
		{
			"blogTool":"WordPress"
			"commentTextFieldName":"messageTextArea",
			"commentButtonName":"SubmitButton",
			"commentAuthorLoggedIn":true,
			"commentFormName":"commentForm"
		}
	}
};

author avatar

Author

Tim McCormack lives in Somerville, MA, USA and works as a software developer. (Updated 2019.)

Entry

No comments yet. Feed icon

Self-service commenting is not yet reimplemented after the Wordpress migration, sorry! For now, you can respond by email; please indicate whether you're OK with having your response posted publicly (and if so, under what name).