A big problem with Avro, BSON, and many other "binary JSON" formats is that they're not isomorphic with JSON, they have a bunch of additional stuff added on. There's Avro documents that don't have direct JSON equivalents. Which means that when a human needs to read the data, you have to transform it into some third format.
It's a core feature of Ion that the text and binary representations are isomorphic. You can take any Ion binary document and pretty-print it as an Ion text document that is exactly equivalent. You can edit that document and send it into your application, which will be guaranteed to be able to read it. Or you can take your hand-authored text data and transcode it into binary, and know that any Ion application can handle it without any extra effort.
> A big problem with Avro, BSON, and many other "binary JSON" formats is that they're not isomorphic with JSON, they have a bunch of additional stuff added on. There's Avro documents that don't have direct JSON equivalents. Which means that when a human needs to read the data, you have to transform it into some third format.
Also, field order matters in Avro but not in JSON. That bit me pretty hard once... fortunately, I found out that Python's JSON library lets you read a JSON file into an OrderedDict instead of a plain dict, so I was able to get around it.
It's a core feature of Ion that the text and binary representations are isomorphic. You can take any Ion binary document and pretty-print it as an Ion text document that is exactly equivalent. You can edit that document and send it into your application, which will be guaranteed to be able to read it. Or you can take your hand-authored text data and transcode it into binary, and know that any Ion application can handle it without any extra effort.