Shorter encoding. Count the bytes: ["foo","bar",1,"baz","quux"] Vs "/foo/bar/1/baz/quux" It's also less parsing, and for many systems a less wieldy

Shorter encoding. Count the bytes: ["foo","bar",1,"baz","quux"] Vs "/foo/bar/1/baz/quux" It's also less parsing, and for many systems a less wieldy/less errorprone entity to pass around your runtime. You unpack it at the time you need to dereference the JSON pointer.