> It will complicate processing. In practice, it doesn't. If you want to know if an IonValue is null, ask it with #isNull. If you don't care about the null's t

> It will complicate processing. In practice, it doesn't. If you want to know if an IonValue is null, ask it with #isNull. If you don't care about the null's type, ignore it. On the other hand, the type is an additional form of metadata which allows overloading the meaning of a value. nulls can also be annotated, so Ion doesn't really have the concept of a singular shared null sentinel. More so than JSON, Ion often uses nulls to differentiate presence from value (that is, the lack of a field in a struct has a different meaning the presence of that field with a null value). Since nulls are objects, they can be tested separately from the lack of a field definition. > a timestamp is clearly an aggregate and should be understood as corresponding to some structure type. Timestamps are structured types with a literal representation that is explicitly modeled in the specification. You're free to ignore it and use a custom schema for representing time, but you've moved any validation into your application at that point and are no better off than JSON.