Basic Notation
--------------
+OVSDB uses JSON, as defined by RFC 4627, for its schema format and its
+wire protocol format. The JSON implementation in Open vSwitch has the
+following limitations:
+
+ - Null bytes (\u0000) are not allowed in strings.
+
+ - Only UTF-8 encoding is supported. (RFC 4627 also mentions
+ UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, and UTF-32.)
+
+ - RFC 4627 says that names within a JSON object should be unique.
+ The Open vSwitch JSON parser discards all but the last value
+ for a name that is specified more than once.
+
The descriptions below use the following shorthand notations for JSON
values. Additional notation is presented later.