Manifesto

A declaration of the convictions behind Internet Object — why it exists and what it refuses to compromise.

Data is the substance of the Internet, and we still move it wastefully.

JSON proved that humans must be able to read their data — and then it stayed wasteful, lossy, and schemaless by default. The binary formats proved that the wire must be small — and then they made data unreadable and forked their schemas into a separate toolchain. Both were half-right. We accepted the choice between them for twenty years. We don't have to anymore.

Internet Object begins from a refusal: we will not choose between readable and efficient, between expressive and exact, between human and machine. A format for the Internet must serve all of them, at the scale the Internet actually runs.

These are the convictions it is built on.

1. The wire is not free. A format used everywhere, constantly, has no right to be wasteful. Every key repeated on every record is bytes paid for again and again — in storage, in bandwidth, in energy, in latency. We declare structure once and never repeat it.

2. Structure is not data. Keys, types, and constraints belong to the schema. A record carries only its values. Conflating the two was the inherited mistake; separating them is what makes data compact, validated, and self-describing all at once.

3. The model is the contract, not the bytes. A schema and its data are one truth, validated one way. Whether that truth is serialized as human-readable text or as a compact binary form, it means the same thing and validates the same way. The encoding is a choice; the meaning never changes.

4. Data must tell the truth. A decimal is exact. A bigint is whole. A date is a date, and binary is binary. No silent coercion, no precision lost in transit. Where other formats shrug, Internet Object is precise.

5. Meaning belongs in the format. Validation is not a second language in a second file. The shape of data — its types, its constraints — is declared with the data, in the same syntax as the data, and enforced as a property of the format itself.

6. The Internet is a stream, not a file. Data arrives over time, in volume, between parties who often already agree on its shape. Documents, collections, and streaming are first-class — not features bolted onto a format that assumed everything fits in memory at once.

7. Open to all. Locked to none. Internet Object is an openly specified contract on the wire, not a library in a language or a product from a vendor. Anyone can implement it; no one can lock you into it. Data you store today will still be understood long after the tools that wrote it are gone.

Internet Object is a promise: that data can be readable and small, expressive and validated, precise and fast — bound to no language and no vendor.

Not a better library. A better default.

See Also