> To set the contract between the two applications, I had to write a JSON spec [1], which is written in... JSON. That was an abstruse and abusive use of JSON, i

> To set the contract between the two applications, I had to write a JSON spec [1], which is written in... JSON. That was an abstruse and abusive use of JSON, in my opinion. The XML equivalent is an XML schema, also written in XML. This is pretty decent as document validation goes. > I think most people just need to use a plain-text format [4] for most of the things they want, à lá RFC 822 [5]. You linked to formats which don't even support nesting. If you roll your own markup it's going to be brittle and people are going to parse it with regexps.