I deleted my snarky comment because I want to be more serious. You never know when you hack something quick if it may become a future standard for trillions of

I deleted my snarky comment because I want to be more serious. You never know when you hack something quick if it may become a future standard for trillions of handshakes! JSON looks so clean and tidy on that business card, but when you look at both RFCs you realize: ZOMG there is a lot of stuff that needs to be thought out!! There are some purists in this thread who claim it is the parsers' fault. I can almost get behind that, but not 100% because you really do need to be more clear about several things (different types of numbers, different character sets, minimum requirements -and- maximum requirements...) I agree with OP that not including implicit version numbers was an oversight: it looks ugly, but if you're not going to put in all the thought in at the start, at least make a version number required so you can ignore mistakes. Let this document be a lesson to anyone who writes a data schema/grammar that eventually replaces JSON.