2. This is in no way better at handling concurrent changes than anything other diff format. In fact, the extra operations it has do nothing to help you here (it is as good and bad as copy/add, or insert/delete diffs). I'd love to know why you seem to think otherwise.

JSON awareness only helps when trying to apply partial patches. At that point, the only thing it can possibly buy you is syntactic correctness, which is worthless without semantic correctness (and in fact, sometimes worse)

Doesn't this allow the sender to send updates without knowledge of the existing values, though? With a string diff, the existing value would have to be known.

> This is in no way better at handling concurrent changes than anything other diff format. In fact, the extra operations it has do nothing to help you here (it is as good and bad as copy/add, or insert/delete diffs). I'd love to know why you seem to think otherwise.

If you're sending a regular diff, you would clobber changes to other parts of the object if they were updated between your initial retrieval and subsequent change. But yeah, it doesn't seem to help with applying concurrent changes to the same part of an object, though I don't know if the patch format should shoulder that responsibility.

This system requires knowledge of existing values/nodes to create the diff/patch document.

However for JSON data, it does have the advantage of not clobbering data unlike a string diff as you mentioned.

A text-based diff doesn't really gain much for what it loses in use cases.