2019-09 Release Notes

For the vast majority of schema authors, we hope that these changes are minimally disruptive.

The most likely to be frustrating is that format is no longer treated as a validation assertion by default (although it is still possible for an application or user to configure a validator to treat it as one). We decided this was acceptable because many schema authors are already extremely frustrated by its inconsistent behavior.

For implementors, there is a lot more to consider, and further guidance on implementation topics will be forthcoming.

• Incompatible Changes
• Semi-incompatible Changes
• Annotations, Errors, and Outputs
• Keyword Changes
  • Core Vocabulary
  • Applicator Vocabulary
  • Validation Vocabulary
  • Format Vocabulary
  • Content Vocabulary
  • Meta-Data Vocabulary
  • Hyper-Schema Vocabulary

For a basic list of changes to each document, see their change logs:

• Core
• Validation
• Hyper-Schema

Incompatible Changes

• By default, format is no longer an assertion. This has been done because the inconsistent implementation of format as an assertion has been an endless source of surprising problems for schema authors. The default behavior will now be predictable, if not ideal. There are several ways to turn on assertion functionality, as explained below. However, we recommend doing semantic validation in the application layer.
• Plain name fragments are no longer defined with $id, but instead with the new keyword $anchor (which has a different syntax).
• $id cannot contain a fragment anymore (except possibly an empty fragment, although that is discouraged).
• In cases where multiple URIs could be used for the same schema, some are now discouraged. These are believed to have rarely been used, as the behavior involved was fairly confusing and not well explained until the updated version of draft-07 (draft-handrews-json-schema-01). If this doesn't mean much to you, you are probably safe.

Semi-incompatible Changes

The old syntax for these keywords is not an error (and the default meta-schema still validates them), so implementations can therefore offer a compatibility mode. However, migrating to the new keywords is straightforward and should be preferred.

• definitions is now $defs
• dependencies has been split into dependentSchemas and dependentRequired

Annotations, Errors, and Outputs

Annotation keywords such as title, readOnly, and default have always been a part of JSON Schema, but without any guidance on how to make use of them. This draft formalizes how implementations can make annotation information available to applications.

Similarly, there has not previously been guidance on what constitutes useful error reporting when validation fails.

To solve both of these problems, we now recommend that implementations support one or more of standardized output formats.

Keyword Changes

All keywords have now been organized into vocabularies, with the Core and Validation specifications containing multiple vocabularies. In this process, some keywords have moved from Validation into Core.

Core Vocabulary

Core Specification, Section 8

Applicator Vocabulary

Core Specification, Section 9

These keywords were formerly found in the Validation Specification.

The other applicator vocabulary keywords are items, additionalItems, properties, patternProperties, additionalProperties, anyOf, allOf, oneOf, not, if, then, else.

Validation Vocabulary

Validation Specification, Section 6

Format Vocabulary

Validation Specification, Section 7

The format keywords has always been problematic due to its optional nature. There has never been a way to ensure that the implementation processing your schema supports format at all, or if it does, to what degree it validates each type of format. In theory, since each format references a standard specification, if a format is supported, it should behave consistently. In practice, this is not the case.

There are two ways for an application to validate formats: It can rely on a JSON Schema implementation to validate them (which may or may not have the expected results), or it can note where the format keyword has been used and perform its own validation based on that. This second approach is supported by treating format as an annotation keyword and supporting the basic, detailed, or verbose output formats.

To impose some predictability on this system, the behavior has changed in several ways, as illustrated below. The key difference here is that format validation is now predictably off by default, but can be configured to be turned on. In draft-07, it was on (but possibly unimplemented) by default and could be configured to be turned off.

In the following charts, the "supported" column refers to whether and (for 2019-09) to what degree the implementation claims to support the format keyword. The "configuration" column refers to whether some non-default behavior for format is configured somehow (in a configuration file, or through a command-line option, or whatever).

Summary of draft-07 behavior

Obviously, each implementation will behave consistently from schema to schema, although some formats may be supported more thoroughly than others despite the wording in the specification. However, complex formats are, in practice, supported to different degrees in each implementation. If they are supported at all.

Summary of 2019-09 behavior

The goal with this draft is to make the default behavior predictable, with the inconsistent behavior as an opt-in feature. This is not entirely satisfactory, but we feel that it is a good first step to reduce the number of complaints seen around surprising results. This way, there should at least be fewer surprises.

• "best effort" validation is a fairly weak requirement, which matches how things work in practice today. Simple formats are probably fully valid, complex formats may be minimally validated or even not validated at all.

• "full syntax" validation means that you can expect a reasonably thorough syntactic validation, probably corresponding to whatever commonly available libraries can do in the implementation language. For formats such as IP addresses and dates, this is expected to be complete validation. For more complex formats such as email addresses, support will probably still vary significantly. It's unclear how many implementations have ever provided this level of support.

• An outcome of vocabulary error means that the implementation will refuse to process the schema as it cannot satisfy the vocabulary requirement.

Note that, given that almost no draft-07 or earlier implementations have offered strict and complete validation of every single format, it seems unlikely that any implementations will support option 3 option in practice.

Additionally, two new formats were added, and a specification reference was updated:

Content Vocabulary

Validation Specification, Section 8

These keywords are now specified purely as annotations, and never assertions. Some guidance is provided around how an implementation can optionally offer further automatic processing of this information outside of the validation process.

Meta-Data Vocabulary

Validation Specification, Section 9

Hyper-Schema Vocabulary

Hyper-Schema Specification, Sections 5 and 6