I'll take credit for that one. In the mid 90's at Nombas we created what we called DSP (Distributed Scripting Protocol) that serialized data (and functions) int

I'll take credit for that one. In the mid 90's at Nombas we created what we called DSP (Distributed Scripting Protocol) that serialized data (and functions) into js objects (now known as JSON) to be both human- and computer- readable and solve a lot of other problems (one of them being the danger of IBM's XML-hell, or Microsoft's DCOM or Suns's i-forget-what-it-was-called-java-thing taking over). We showed it doing super-duper cool stuff at ECMA committee meetings, and to the magazines and trade shows of the day, and filed patents for just about everything now seen as "AJAX" or "dnode"--had a lot of fun, but also A LOT of trouble getting people to use it because they saw it as weird. Douglas Crockford's brilliant move was to create the web site http://json.org/ http://json.org/ By putting the ".org" at the end he tricked the world into believing it was an accepted standard.