It might be worth noting that, by the words of Douglas Crockford, JSON wasn't even at first specified, it was "discovered."[0] As in, a small group of people at

It might be worth noting that, by the words of Douglas Crockford, JSON wasn't even at first specified, it was "discovered."[0] As in, a small group of people at a startup were wanting an object interchange format they could use in the browser in the early 2000s, found that JavaScript object literals worked good enough, and went with that. It only became a standard after the fact. If the data you have requires more thought as to how to store it than "JavaScript's object notation is good enough," then perhaps a specialized binary format would work better. Then again, nearly all APIs only accept and receive JSON. JSON is the one object notation that gets all the attention, so most maintainers will focus their time making optimizations for reading or writing JSON. And if you don't like XML or YAML for some reason, then JSON is tempting to use as a config file format, although it critically lacks comments or heredocs. [0] http://www.json.org/fatfree.html http://www.json.org/fatfree.html