I will never understand the tendency, especially in the web community, to consider complicated, ambiguous, inconsistent, and difficult to parse syntaxes as "friendly".
It might seem like a good idea at first, but over time it just results in a culture that publishes horrifically broken markup, and increasingly baroque implementations that try to work around every possible screw-up instead of simply flagging errors. This is, in my opinion, the biggest screw-up of the web: if early browsers simply flagged errors and pointed out where and what they are clearly, the web would be a much nicer place. Instead, actually writing a parser for web markup is a nearly impossible task, and not the weekend hack it should be.
One of the, if not the, great thing(s) about JSON is its beautifully simple syntax. 5 images on json.org precisely explain what it is, and that's that. You can write a parser for it in basically any language without any fancy libraries or frameworks in a few hours. That is a good thing, regardless of whether you personally would ever have to do such a thing, because it keeps the barrier of entry low and trickles through the ecosystem in positive ways.
Missing the point of JSON? Yes, but missing much more, including lessons that should have been learned.
That said, a few of the ideas are good ones (comments and such), but the bad ones (making crucial delimiters optional) are so bad they more than outweigh the benefits.
It might seem like a good idea at first, but over time it just results in a culture that publishes horrifically broken markup, and increasingly baroque implementations that try to work around every possible screw-up instead of simply flagging errors. This is, in my opinion, the biggest screw-up of the web: if early browsers simply flagged errors and pointed out where and what they are clearly, the web would be a much nicer place. Instead, actually writing a parser for web markup is a nearly impossible task, and not the weekend hack it should be.
One of the, if not the, great thing(s) about JSON is its beautifully simple syntax. 5 images on json.org precisely explain what it is, and that's that. You can write a parser for it in basically any language without any fancy libraries or frameworks in a few hours. That is a good thing, regardless of whether you personally would ever have to do such a thing, because it keeps the barrier of entry low and trickles through the ecosystem in positive ways.
Missing the point of JSON? Yes, but missing much more, including lessons that should have been learned.
That said, a few of the ideas are good ones (comments and such), but the bad ones (making crucial delimiters optional) are so bad they more than outweigh the benefits.