That said, David gets it exactly right: the expressiveness of the structure has to match the complexity of the information, something that can be expressed in path metrics, not to be described here. JSON is a low cost alternative. That’s fine. One thing years of markup experience taught me was to recant the wall-to-wall markup advocacy. It’s wrong. Can it all be wrangled in under the InfoSet? To be demonstrated by someone with more time and need to do that.

{“names!”: [
{“name-order”: [“honorific”, “given-name”, “middle-name”, “surname”],
“given-name”: “Anna”,
“middle-name”: “Maria”,
“surname”: “Mozart”,
“honorific”: “Dr.”}]}

While I generally shudder at mixing semantics with data, I’m not so sure I care in this case.

It’s misleading to argue that JSON is better because it’s simpler, or that XML is better because it’s more expressive, because there’s practically no difference on either count. It just happens that XML is generally used in situations where the information is more elaborate than a simple data structure, or, more importantly, in situations where you cannot constrain how the formats are actually used (one person might index the information, one might publish it, one might build a web app around it, etc.). JSON can work there too, but when it does, it will end up looking a lot like the XML. For the simple, RPC-like data structures that are currently JSON’s domain, XML can just as easily look a lot like JSON. I’ve made some changes to the posting along these lines.

e.g. the proposed “surname-after-given-names” property would never, ever be necessary, as you’d be doing something like this when actually using the data:

person.given-name + ” ” + person.surname

It seems to me like you’re thinking too much about representing the data in a way which is somehow equivalent with the XML, and not enough about how the data structures defined in your JSON (“That is trickier to dump straight into a data structure” – JSON *is* your data structure) will actually be used – in which case, an object for each name with properties for each section of the name really is a natural and intuitive way to represent the information.

In this case, all you’d really need to do would be to add prefix, and postfix properties to the format Douglas Crockford proposed in his blog post.

[name]John [sort]Cowan[/sort][/name]

[name][sort]Szilard[/sort] Leo[/name]

[name][sort]Mao[/sort] Zedong[/name]

[name][sort]Sukarno[/sort][/name]

[name]Vicente [sort]Fox[/sort] Quesada[/name]

[name]Alexis de [sort]Tocqueville[/sort][/name]

[name]Charles [sort]de Gaulle[/sort][/name]

[name]Henry [sort]Ford[/sort] II[/name]

[name][sort]Elizabeth II[/sort][/name]