> Then some of us realised JSON is actually too dumb for many things, and instead of going back to XML we made JSON Schema, OpenAPI, etc.
This take doesn't make any sense at all.
JSON Schema is a validation tool for languages based on JSON. You build your subset language based on JSON, and you want to validate input data to check whether it complies with your format. Instead of writing your own parser, you specify your language with a high-level language and run the validation as a post-parsing step. Nothing in this usecase involves anything resembling "too dumb".
OpenAPI is a language to specify your APIs. At most, it is orthogonal to JSON. Again, nothing in this usecase involves anything resembling "too dumb".
JSON is just one of those tools that is a major success, and thus people come out of the woodwork projecting their frustrations and misconceptions on a scapegoat. "JSON is too dumb because I developed a JSON-based format that I need to validate." "JSON is too dumb because I need to document how my RESTful API actually works". What does JSON has to do with anything?
You're making an interesting distinction between "JSON" and "languages based on JSON" there, which I don't. JSON and XML in isolation are just a bunch of punctuation and not useful. They're only useful when we know the structure of the data within them. XML already had schemas, and we were able to easily (YMMV!) validate the correctness of a document.
JSON was simpler because we would just say to each other "I'll send you a {"foo":{"bar":1234,"ok":true}}", "Cool thx" - and there wasn't a way to formalise that even if we wanted to. That doesn't scale well though. We needed a (machine-readable) way to define what the data should actually look like, thus OpenAPI etc.
> You're making an interesting distinction between "JSON" and "languages based on JSON" there, which I don't.
That's basically the root cause of your misconceptions. A document format encoded in JSON is a separate format, which happens to be a subset of JSON. A byte stream can be a valid JSON document but it's broken with regards to the document format you specified. Tools like JSONPath bridge the gap between your custom document format and JSON. This is not a JSON shortcoming or design flaw.
> They're only useful when we know the structure of the data within them.
They are only useful to you because you're complaining that you still need to parse your custom format. This is not a problem with JSON or any other document format. This is only a misconception you have with regards to what you're doing.
This take doesn't make any sense at all.
JSON Schema is a validation tool for languages based on JSON. You build your subset language based on JSON, and you want to validate input data to check whether it complies with your format. Instead of writing your own parser, you specify your language with a high-level language and run the validation as a post-parsing step. Nothing in this usecase involves anything resembling "too dumb".
OpenAPI is a language to specify your APIs. At most, it is orthogonal to JSON. Again, nothing in this usecase involves anything resembling "too dumb".
JSON is just one of those tools that is a major success, and thus people come out of the woodwork projecting their frustrations and misconceptions on a scapegoat. "JSON is too dumb because I developed a JSON-based format that I need to validate." "JSON is too dumb because I need to document how my RESTful API actually works". What does JSON has to do with anything?