The Story of the TOON Extension: Why We Built It and Its Benefits
In the world of data serialization, JSON has long been the reigning champion. It's lightweight, easy to parse, and universally supported. However, as developers who spend a significant amount of time working with configuration files and other human-edited data, we started to notice some of JSON's limitations. The strict syntax, with its abundance of braces and commas, can be cumbersome to write and prone to errors.
This led us to explore alternatives, and we were immediately drawn to TOON (Tab-Oriented Object Notation). TOON's indentation-based syntax felt like a breath of fresh air. It was clean, readable, and reminded us of the simplicity of languages like Python. We found that we could write and edit TOON by hand much faster and with fewer mistakes than JSON.
Why We Created the TOON Extension
As we began to use TOON more frequently in our projects, we realized that the tooling around it was still in its infancy. We missed the convenience of the browser extensions we used for JSON, which allowed us to quickly view and validate JSON files directly in the browser. We decided that if we wanted TOON to be a viable alternative to JSON, it needed to have the same level of tooling support.
And so, the TOON extension was born. Our goal was to create a browser extension that would make working with TOON as seamless and efficient as working with JSON. We wanted to provide a tool that would not only display TOON files in a readable format but also help users to understand and debug their TOON data.
The Benefits of Using the TOON Extension
The TOON extension offers a number of benefits for developers working with TOON:
- Instant Readability: The extension automatically formats TOON files in the browser, making them easy to read and understand at a glance.
- Syntax Highlighting: Just like our JSON viewer, the TOON extension provides syntax highlighting to help you distinguish between keys, values, and comments.
- Error Detection: The extension can detect common syntax errors in your TOON files and provide helpful feedback to help you fix them.
- Seamless Integration: The extension works automatically on any page with a `application/toon` content type, so you don't have to do anything special to use it.
Examples in Action
Let's take a look at a simple example. Here's a JSON object representing a user:
{
"name": "John Doe",
"email": "john.doe@example.com",
"roles": [
"admin",
"editor"
]
}And here's the same object in TOON format:
name: John Doe
email: john.doe@example.com
roles:
- admin
- editor
As you can see, the TOON version is much cleaner and easier to read. With the TOON extension, this is how the data will be displayed in your browser, with the added benefit of syntax highlighting.
The Future of TOON
We believe that TOON has the potential to become a popular alternative to JSON, especially for human-edited data. We are committed to improving the TOON extension and adding new features to make it even more powerful and user-friendly. We welcome your feedback and contributions to help us make TOON a first-class citizen in the world of data serialization.