New principle: Don't invent something new just because the existing thing isn't perfect

[martinthomson]

This was brought up here by @annevk.

The observation was that pointing out the shortcomings of JSON might lead people to build a new format. In almost every case, that's probably the worst possible reaction. JSON might be awful, but a new format is almost guaranteed to be far worse overall.

Instead, we might recommend that people use the existing thing and maybe incrementally improve it.

[csarven]

Could Microdata be an example, given the availability of RDFa and microformats?

[csarven]

Examples:

• WHATWG Microdata given e.g., W3C RDFa
• WHATWG URL given e.g., IETF RFC 3986, RFC 3987
• WHATWG URL Pattern given e.g., IETF RFC 6570
• W3C URL Fragment Text Directives given e.g., W3C Selectors and States
• ...