I don’t think that means it was not invented. Otherwise we would have had it years before. What I understand “based on a subset of JavaScript” to mean is, Crock

I don’t think that means it was not invented. Otherwise we would have had it years before. What I understand “based on a subset of JavaScript” to mean is, Crockford chose some of the JS data types (object, array, number, string) and invented a string representation of them that could be used as a data interchange format. That was revolutionary. I remember when I first learned about JSON. It felt like Crockford was a genius for coming up with it, and then wondering why nobody else had come up with it before him. There is no way we would have suffered through XML Hell for so many years I’d there had been another option. But there wasn’t another option. Why? Because Crockford hadn’t invented JSON yet.