Fixing JSON

Shameful confession: when I was first introduced to JSON, I was convinced it would go nowhere. "XML already does everything JSON does! And there's no way to differentiate between nodes and attributes! And there are no namespaces! And no schemas! What's the point of JSON?" And a couple of years later I looked up from the tangled mess of XSLT I was working on to discover that the rest of the world had moved on.

JSON is just javascript, and it leaves out everything else. That's its entire reason for existing, and it caught on because that's all that 99.44% of anyone needed.

Timestamps you can add today, without changing the protocol; just put them in your data if you need them. So I'm not sure what he's even proposing there.

Schemas: OK, he doesn't like JSON Schema's anyOf. Fair enough. There's no real proposal here for how to fix it, so not much to say here.

Replacing commas with whitespace sounds to me like replacing a very minor irritant with a constant full-body rash. Stuff like his example of "IDs": [ 116 943 234 38793 ] would lead to far more confusion and errors than the occasional stray trailing comma.

So I guess I pretty much vote no on this one thanks for asking

I was thinking along very similar lines when reading the article by Tim Bray. JSON is designed for JavaScript compatibility, I almost stopped reading when he said:

> They’re inessen­tial to the gram­mar, just there for JavaScript com­pat­i­bil­i­ty.

The entire article goes on to suggest extremely terrible solutions to the problems he is pointing out.

In order:

Commas: If comma's are an annoyance, is that to mean there is no annoyance with XML markup? You can forget a closing tag just as easily, probably more easily. Just get a JavaScript or JSON linter. Fixed. If you are really annoyed by commas, move to YAML or another format.

Datetimes: Just store your dates in a standardized timezone and format, how about [ISO 8601](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601). You can also use a [JSON-Schema](http://json-schema.org/) if you really want.

Schemas: There's lots of potentials here. However, again, if you're going to change JSON so much, why not just pick another data format that has better schema support.