Formats very similar to JSON have been invented many times, for instance NeXT/Apple used to have a human readable format for their plist files that was basicall

Formats very similar to JSON have been invented many times, for instance NeXT/Apple used to have a human readable format for their plist files that was basically JSON with different characters. http://code.google.com/p/networkpx/wiki/PlistSpec http://code.google.com/p/networkpx/wiki/PlistSpec For some reason they stopped using text plists and replaced it with an ugly xml serialization, but you still see these in Xcode's debugger if you log an NSArray or NSDictionary to the console.