> What you call crippling is what makes JSON easy to work with and universally adopted. For some specific tasks, certainly. A tool I am developing for myself

> What you call crippling is what makes JSON easy to work with and universally adopted. For some specific tasks, certainly. A tool I am developing for myself cripples the input format even more, because the more reduced the input is the easier it is to use for a specific task. Could I have used a more powerful format? Sure, but then a format that allows too much is harder to use (especially when those extra features aren't needed). The scope of the input should match the scope of the problem. I was only pointing out that, at the highest level, the format that allows everything is Lisp s-expressions. Everything else is a less-abled form of s-expressions. Some of those formats would have been best served by simply being s-expressions instead (like XML), while others (like JSON) serve a different purpose and don't need all those extra features.