Data in itself can be typed. For JSON objects the equivalent type is usually called a Record. Within a single strictly typed program, data is transferred betwee

Data in itself can be typed. For JSON objects the equivalent type is usually called a Record. Within a single strictly typed program, data is transferred between methods and functions and the shape of this data would be described by a type. There is not much of a difference, theoretically speaking, when data is passed between functions inside an app, or between apps via some network api. What you describe is actually a real issue in typing. Types are lost across systems. JSON is not strictly typed, neither is XML or SQL. So if I have a typed application that spits out data to these formats I lose type checking. If you think about it, even jumping across abstractions from one typed language (say rust on the backend) to another typed language (say typescript on the frontend) you will lose type safety due to incompatibilities between languages. I don't know if there's research into or thought going into solving this issue. But a universal type language/syntax that can be translated into respective type systems across api abstractions could lend a lot to safety of entire ecosystems. There is no type safety across http services and designing a system to overcome this issue is very possible and to my knowledge not something people have thought about yet. New idea? Imagine a language/framework that compiles into web apps and microservices on some cloud provider. The language has syntax that allows me to decorate functions to specify which microservice it runs on. Data transfer between microservices can now be placed in some binary format or maybe the language has syntax that allows me to specify human readability. Either way the language abstracts away the devops and webapp layer and combines it into a single source code... this would allow type checking of the shape of data to not happen just within an app, but across services. Is there such a framework/language that does this? I'm positive it can be done. I would totally love to work on an idea like this. The microservice fad talked up modularity between services but in practice people realized that microservices are too complicated. Perhaps an entire language framework that combines the web app layer and dev ops layer and adds type checking across services would solve this issue.