diff --git a/src/blog/more-than-json.html.pm b/src/blog/more-than-json.html.pm
index 34e9f0e..75f3325 100644
--- a/src/blog/more-than-json.html.pm
+++ b/src/blog/more-than-json.html.pm
@@ -12,36 +12,36 @@ I’ve been doing a lot of research for my current side project, ◊link[#:href
One of the things I wasn’t satisfied with in the first version of Pterotype was the way it stores incoming data. ActivityPub messages are serialized in a dialect of JSON called ◊link[#:href "https://json-ld.org/"]{JSON-LD}. I didn’t really get JSON-LD when I started this project. It seems overcomplicated and confusing, and I was more interested in shipping something that worked than understanding the theoretical underpinnings of the federated web. So I just kept the incoming data in JSON format. This worked, sort of, but I kept running into annoying, hard-to-reason about situations. For example, consider this ActivityPub object, representing a new note that Sally published:
◊codeblock[#:lang "json"]{
- {
- "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
- "id": "https://example.org/activities/1",
- "type": "Create",
- "actor": {
- "type": "Person",
- "id": "https://example.org/sally",
- "name": "Sally"
- },
- "object": {
- "id": "https://example.org/notes/1",
- "type": "Note",
- "content": "This is a simple note"
- },
- "published": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
- }
- }
+{
+ "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
+ "id": "https://example.org/activities/1",
+ "type": "Create",
+ "actor": {
+ "type": "Person",
+ "id": "https://example.org/sally",
+ "name": "Sally"
+ },
+ "object": {
+ "id": "https://example.org/notes/1",
+ "type": "Note",
+ "content": "This is a simple note"
+ },
+ "published": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
+}
+}
The problem is that the above object, according to the ActivityPub specification, is semantically equivalent to this one:
◊codeblock[#:lang "json"]{
{
- "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
- "id": "https://example.org/activities/1",
- "type": "Create",
- "actor": "https://example.org/sally",
- "object": "https://example.org/notes/1",
- "published": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
- }
- }
+ "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
+ "id": "https://example.org/activities/1",
+ "type": "Create",
+ "actor": "https://example.org/sally",
+ "object": "https://example.org/notes/1",
+ "published": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
+}
+}
This is the object graph in action – the ◊code{actor} and ◊code{object} properties are pointers to other objects, and as such they can either be JSON objects embedded within the ◊code{Create} activity, or URIs that dereference to the actual object (dereferencing is a fancy word for following the URI and replacing it with whatever JSON object is on the other side). Since I was representing these ActivityPub objects in this JSON format, that meant that whenever I saw an ◊code{actor} or ◊code{object} property, I always had to check whether it was an object or a URI and if it was a URI I had to dereference it to the proper object. This led to tons of annoying boilerplate and conditionals:
@@ -61,30 +61,30 @@ So what’s the actual solution for this? Well, as it turns out these were exact
◊codeblock[#:lang "json"]{
[
- {
- "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#actor": [
- {
- "@id": "https://example.org/sally"
- }
- ],
- "@id": "https://example.org/activities/1",
- "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#object": [
- {
- "@id": "https://example.org/notes/1"
- }
- ],
- "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#published": [
- {
- "@type": "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime",
- "@value": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
- }
- ],
- "@type": [
- "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Create"
- ]
- }
- ]
- }
+ {
+ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#actor": [
+ {
+ "@id": "https://example.org/sally"
+ }
+ ],
+ "@id": "https://example.org/activities/1",
+ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#object": [
+ {
+ "@id": "https://example.org/notes/1"
+ }
+ ],
+ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#published": [
+ {
+ "@type": "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime",
+ "@value": "2015-01-25T12:34:56Z"
+ }
+ ],
+ "@type": [
+ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Create"
+ ]
+ }
+]
+}
So what’s up with those weird URL-looking attributes? And why has everything become an array?