json-ld/json-ld.org — Issue #53: Remove normalization completely from JSON-LD or make it return a JSON-LD object
Author: lanthaler
Created: 2012-01-11 03:48:22+00:00
State: open
Labels: spec-design

In one of Gregg's last [updates to the spec](3c8427bc1b96cbc844d3850fdd4a7f74edcc0f30) the normalization was changed to return a string containing an RDF serialization "which will most likely be something in an N-Triples like format" instead of a JSON-LD document. This makes it impossible for a JSON-LD parser to interpret a normalized JSON-LD document. Effectively the result of normalization is not even valid JSON-LD anymore.

If we keep this, it would not only render the media type option *form=normalized* useless but also prevent storing normalized documents and retrieving them at a later point since JSON-LD parsers would have to include a N-Triples parser and a N-Triples to JSON-LD conversion as well.

IMHO there are basically two options to solve this issue:

- return a JSON-LD object in the form of a string
- or completely remove normalization and all the references to it from JSON-LD (syntax and API)