I'm a JSON curmudgeon, in that I think that its type-system, inherited from JavaScript, is bad. It's a limited vocabulary of types, and it forces developers to play odd games of convention. For example, because it lacks any sort of date type, you either have to explode your date out as a sub-dictionary (arguably, the "right" approach) or do what most people do- use an ISO formatted string as your date. The latter version requires you to attempt to parse the sting to validate the data, but validating JSON is a whole thing anyway.

But, enough about me being old and cranky. Do you know one type JSON supports? Boolean values.

Which is why this specification from today's anonymous submitter annoys me so much:

field: sw_auto_update
type: string
valid values: /(on)|(off)/

field: data_auto_update
type: string
valid values: /(on)|(off)/

field: spanning_tree_protocol
type: string
valid values: /(on)|(off)/

Their custom validator absolutely requires the use of strings, and absolutely requires that they have these values. Sending a boolean, or worse, the string "true" causes the request to get rejected.

Our submitter doesn't explain why it's this way, but I have a strong suspicion that it's because it was originally designed to support a form submission with radio buttons. The form is long gone, but the API contract remains.

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