JSON5 Data Interchange Format

https://json5.org/

by gjvc • 5 years ago

100 151 5 years ago

json5.org

develatio• 5 years ago

IIRC there is a JSON6 format which adds features and improvements on top of JSON5.

gchq-7703• 5 years ago

HJSON [0] is also another format that tries to make it easier for humans to read / write json.

[0] https://hjson.github.io/

roncohen• 5 years ago

Couple of gripes:

    - Still no date type
    - Why make it more loose? Like "Strings may be single quoted." doesn't bring any value.

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

What would a date type look like? An ISO-8601 string is probably as good as it'll get, else you end up with an object containing loads of additional information like timezones, offsets, etc. There's also https://json-schema.org/understanding-json-schema/reference/... for a formalized date format in JSON.

The looseness seems to be aimed at human authors who want to write JSON as if it were JS, so mainly package.json. But, json is not ideal for configuration for multiple reasons.

rbut2• 5 years ago

If you wanted JSON to parse into actual date objects, you could always do:

  {
    thisIsADate: new Date('1995-12-17T03:24:00Z')
  }

It would be simple enough for parsers in other languages to parse this into their own date objects. Much simpler than using regexs to find ISO strings.

alpaca1282• 5 years ago

I agree about the single quotes, but many use single quotes for strings in JS and so it's understandable to have this consistent.

rbut2• 5 years ago

Because:

  ‘I am “really” angry’

Is much nicer than:

  “I am \”really\” angry”

peoplefromibiza• 5 years ago

and now you have two problems

is this any better?

    'I\'m "really" angry, don\'t do it again!'

in many languages single quotes are used as apostrophes and are very very common, much more common than double quotes.

eptcyka3• 5 years ago

Json is not meant to be human readable or writeable.

The_Colonel• 5 years ago

Single quote strings are useful when the string contains many double quotes (e.g. XML with attributes).

pawelduda• 5 years ago

Useful when you need to input already double-quoted value.

But it's a matter of taste still and nothing that we couldn't do before. Such changes will lead to meetings where programmers discuss JSON5 quoting choices (yes, it will be a thing).

AlfeG• 5 years ago

It brings it closer to JavaScript behavior I guess. I guess it's nice to have ability to copy random js object declaration to actual json without editing

alpaca1282• 5 years ago

Strings may include character escapes

Wait, that wasn't possible before?

I like it, most of the additions seem more like filling gaps in the original version. And the lack of trailing commas & comments have always annoyed me a bit.

But as this is a library I'm guessing NPM doesn't support it for the package.json?

Cthulhu_2• 5 years ago

Is there an official standard body behind this (and json 6 mentioned in another comment), or is it a kind of loose / informal standard left up to libraries to implement?

I mean comments and trailing commas will make JSON a bit more human friendly when used in e.g. configuration (package.json), but as a pure data exchange format it doesn't add much. Mind you, there's better data exchange formats than json, like XML (yes I said it) which can be transferred via a binary protocol (https://www.w3.org/TR/exi/) instead of the, when you think about it, awkward and inefficient data -> text format -> compression -> transfer -> decompress -> text format -> parse cycle of both 'traditional' XML and JSON both.

I wouldn't be averse to the idea of browser manufacturers or standards bodies to come up with a more efficient data transfer method that can be human-read with the right tooling like browser development tools, but which is fully compressed binary and efficient on the line. I feel like tools like GRPC are a bit too far out there.

deepsun3• 5 years ago

Msgpack and protobuf do that too. I believe the rise of JSON is attributed to that it's easily human-readable, and because Javascript.

lucideer3• 5 years ago

Not sure human-readability was a major consideration of JSON really, but maybe.

One of the major considerations that many seem to miss today though was simplicity of parsing: it's a much more strict syntax than actual JS so there's a lot less ambiguity in parsing it. E.g. there's no need to have layered logic for recognizing unquoted identifiers, no need to check for multiple quote types on IDs & strings, consistent comma-ing etc. In general giving the author less options will make your parser simpler.

This is notably the exact opposite of YAML's approach.

JSON5 is nowhere near as bad as YAML, but it does seem to leaving behind some of the raison d'être of JSON. Like, I hate double-quoting in JS/JSON (personal bike-shed colour preference), but surely variable quoting characters is the worst of both worlds.

matt_kantor• 5 years ago

Is there an official standard body behind this (and json 6 mentioned in another comment), or is it a kind of loose / informal standard left up to libraries to implement?

There's a spec: https://spec.json5.org/

leecommamichael• 5 years ago

While I think this would make JSON more fun to edit by-hand, I don’t feel the breaking changes across the stack, and mixed adoption, are worth the benefits.

dobladov• 5 years ago

Having comments is probably the functionality I wanted the most.

rk06• 5 years ago

That is why I prefer jsonc. Which is quite sane and most json formatters (that I know of) support it

willvarfar• 5 years ago

json-ld files (json line delimited, means one json object per line) are used extensively in data processing.

A lot of processing of these json-ld files uses normal builtins instead of special libraries eg in python doing a for line in or a stream map and the standard json lib etc.

From a glance at this spec, it seems that where an object ends is no longer something that the normal file processing most languages possess work. Which is a problem.

I’d be surprised if a extended-json ever got traction because everyone already has code that uses the lowest common denominator json parser and line splitting built into whatever language and libraries they are using and those they interchange with already use.

Having said that, the pain points I wrestle with are lack of date types and how to safely pass large integers and currencies etc. Things not addressed in the json5 spec?

xdfgh1112• 5 years ago

I call it JSONL but yeah it's super useful. The ability to split and join using standard Unix tools, or just pipe through GNU parallel for automatic speedup without any boilerplate code

Symbiote• 5 years ago

JSON-LD is JSON Linked Data.

What you describe seems to be called line-delimited JSON, LDJSON, NDJSON or JSONL.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON_streaming

mickael-kerjean• 5 years ago

"Strings may be single quoted."

What's the point? I cringe every time a project uses both double quote and single quote, a mix of semicolon and no semicolon and a mix of tabs and space, .... Which one to pick isn't relevant as soon as the code base is consistent

jeppester• 5 years ago

Maybe they don't think it should be up to them to decide which one you should go with.

selcuka2• 5 years ago

What's the point of standards then?

itsibitzi• 5 years ago

It allows you to put double quotes in the string without escaping them, which is pretty nice.

amelius• 5 years ago

What if you want both?

E.g., how would you put the following sentence in a string:

You can use both " and ' to delimit a string.

usrusr3• 5 years ago

An annoying half-solution that breaks down as soon as you encounter content with both. Better imho to have one way and become good at it. I think I might even prefer trailing commas to be mandatory.

andix2• 5 years ago

But then you can't include single quotes into the string any more. Same problem again.

The most practical solution for this problem I saw was in F#. You can use tripple-quoted strings.

   let a = """The diner is called "John's", but you can't let the string end with a double quote"""

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe...

incrudible2• 5 years ago

Getting over your pet peeves is a superpower.

IshKebab2• 5 years ago

Yeah exactly. That's why they should have stuck with just double quotes. Double quotes are far more popular than single quotes anyway.

smt883• 5 years ago

What's the point?

Some code bases use single quotes, and it's annoying to copy/paste an object from that code into a JSON objdct and have to change the quotes.

qudat• 5 years ago

prettier solved that

q3k• 5 years ago

… could’ve at least disallowed for one of the most batshit crazy aspects of JSON, the legal but undefined behaviour of duplicate keys in objects.

An object whose names are all unique is interoperable in the sense that all software implementations receiving that object will agree on the name-value mappings. When the names within an object are not unique, the behavior of software that receives such an object is unpredictable.

esnard• 5 years ago

It would lose its "backwards compatible" property though.

lifthrasiir• 5 years ago

This can be solved if you base JSON5 on I-JSON (RFC 7493) instead of JSON (RFC 8259). Many (but not all) JSON implementations actually expect I-JSON, at least for object keys.

dane-pgp3• 5 years ago

Having a defined, predictable behaviour in JSON5 doesn't seem like it would break backwards compatibility with JSON's undefined, unpredictable behaviour. I don't think someone with an existing JSON document would complain that a JSON5 parser behaved "too predictably" when interpreting their document.

cryptonector2• 5 years ago

Those are fightin' words you know...

I've seen some of the endless flamewars about removing that.

The problem is ultimately that you kinda can't remove duplicate keys. You can only explain the ways in which handling them varies. I'm glossing over a lot of stuff though and I'll understand your skepticism.

bullen• 5 years ago

I still use the original Java JSON that I compiled from Douglas source back in ~2008 maybe.

It hasen't changed since then and it will never need to change ever in the history of mankind.

Problem solved!

Edit: Maybe this solves another problem though, but I doubt it!

mnd999• 5 years ago

I know it’s not trendy but consider XML and schema at this point. XML allows all this to be expressed and more and schema allows the creation of integration contracts that can be validated at both ends. Tooling and libraries are mature.

Deukhoofd2• 5 years ago

I want to love XML schemas, but to call them mature is a stretch. There's a bunch of important features hidden behind XSD 1.1, which is almost 10 years old by now, yet most software that validates XML on schemas does not support that yet.

DonHopkins6• 5 years ago

The XML Schema standard is terrible, and its mistakes and weaknesses were what drove James Clark and Murata Makoto to develop RELAX NG (REgular LAnguage for XML Next Generation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELAX_NG

RELAX NG has a clearly focused sound mathematical underpinning: regular expressions applied to trees, while XML Schema is an ad-hoc hot mess designed by committee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_schema#RELAX_NG

Any decent JSON schema language should take its cues and learn from the design of RELAX NG, and not repeat the mistakes of XML Schema.

Makoto Murata raised some critical points about XML Schema, which was beyond repair, so they both invented new regexp-based schema languages to address those problems, and combined their respective work into Relax/NG:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Murata#RELAX_and_RELAX_...

Some people, including Murata and James Clark, had critical attitudes toward XML Schema. XML Schema is a modern XML schema language designed by W3C XML Schema Working Group. W3C intended XML Schema to supersede traditional DTD (Document Type Definition). XML Schema supports so many features that its specification is large and complex. Murata, James Clark and those who criticised XML Schema, pointed out the following:
It is difficult to implement all features of XML Schema.
It is difficult for engineers to read and write XML Schema definitions.
It does not permit nondeterministic content models.

James Clark compared Relax NG to XML Schema and its predecessor, SGML Document Type Definitions, in his paper, "The Design of RELAX NG":

https://relaxng.org/jclark/design.html

James Clark has a huge amount of experience designing and implementing SGML and XML standards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clark_(programmer)

I've written about XML Schema, Relax NG, and James Clark eariler:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26122033

Some of the most incredibly awfully bad XML DSLs are official standards, themselves. COUGH XMLSchema COUGH: [...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756875

James Clark used Haskell to design and implement an algorithm for validating Relax NG XML schemas (he co-designed Relax NG, and designed its predecessor TREX), to work the ideas out before re-implementing it in (many many more lines of tedious brittle) Java (JING). Haskel works wonderfully as a design and standard definition language, that way. [...]

A Triumph of Simplicity: James Clark on Markup Languages and XML

https://www.drdobbs.com/a-triumph-of-simplicity-james-clark-...

If you peek under the hood of high-profile open-source projects such as Mozilla, Apache, Perl, and Python, you'll find a little program called "expat" handling the XML parsing. If you've ever used the man command on your GNU/Linux distribution, then you've also used groff, the GNU version of the UNIX text formatting application, troff. If you've ever done any work with SGML, from generating documentation from DocBook to building your own SGML applications, you've undoubtedly come across sgmls, SP, and Jade.

This article "Schema Wars: XML Schema vs. Relax NG (1/2) - exploring XML" enumerates some of James Clark's objections to XML Schema:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190403171512/http://webreferen...

James Clark, leader of the technical committee at OASIS for RELAX NG, and author of one of the first XML parsers, recently described the problems of the XML Schema language in a newsgroup posting:
1) XML Schema definitions require considerable expertise to understand and can contain quite a few surprises.
As an example, if you derive a complex type by restriction you have to specify the new restricted content model explicitly. However, attributes are treated in the opposite way: by default you get all the attributes and you have to explicitly rule out the ones you don't want. A similar inconsistency exists in that if you merge two attribute definitions you get the union of the concrete attribute definitions, but the intersection of attribute wildcards (specified by the anyAttribute element). While these might be convenient choices for the specification, it easily creates confusion for the human reader of XML schemas.
2) The XML Schema Recommendation is hard to read and understand.
To avoid the possible misinterpretations mentioned above you might have to reference the specification in order to fully understand a specific schema definition. I have to agree with Clark that the W3C's XML Schema Recommendation is by far the hardest to read and understand, making it even more difficult to make sense of a particular schema presented to you.
3) W3C XML Schema's support for attributes provides no advance over DTDs.
As with DTDs, W3C XML Schema only allows the specification of whether attributes are required or optional. There is no way to specify more complex constraints between attributes or between attributes or elements, for instance that either attribute X or attribute Y is allowed or that either attribute X or element Y is allowed. The mechanism that is used to constrain the co-occurrence of child elements should be extended to attributes and the combinations of attributes and child elements.
4) W3C XML Schema provides very weak support for unordered content.
When the designer of an XML vocabulary does not wish to force child elements to occur in a particular order, it can be impractical to describe the XML vocabulary using XML Schema, because XML Schema imposes such limitations.
5) Datatype handling in W3C XML Schema lacks modularity.
W3C XML Schema is tied to the single collection of datatypes defined in Part 2 of W3C XML Schema. Yet this collection of datatypes is a very ad-hoc collection. It includes datatypes of highly debatable relevance (gYearMonth, gDay etc). Yet it lacks many datatypes that are important for many applications. A modular approach where a schema language can be combined with one or more standard collections of datatypes, some general-purpose and some domain-specific, is called for here.
6) W3C XML Schema does not define a single notion of validity of a document with respect to a schema.
There are different varieties of validation (lax and strict) and many different ways to validate a document against a schema. From a W3C XML Schema alone, it is not possible to know what is a valid document. For instance there is no way to specify what is allowed as the root element.
7) Magic schema attributes in documents
W3C XML Schema provides the xsi:schemaLocation attribute, which allows an XML document instance to indicate the schema that should be used to validate the document. This creates problems with security (the destination might have changed or tampered with), interoperability (use of schemaLocation is optional) and "purity" of schema definition: There is no way to prevent the document containing magic xsi:* attributes, so the use of W3C XML Schema "infects" the grammar you are defining.
8) Another problematic area in W3C XML Schema is the support for infoset augmentation, such as default attributes.
Apart from being a violation of modularity, this tends to cause interoperability problems, because it leads to the possibility of the application getting different information depending on whether or not validation has been performed.

incrudible2• 5 years ago

The problem is not that XML isn't "trendy". It's annoying to use, especially in an environment where JSON is a first-class citizen.

JSON-schema is a thing as well, maybe not quite as mature (or "aged"), but the tooling is fine.

pydry• 5 years ago

Also massively overengineered.

smt883• 5 years ago

XML is a terrible data interchange format because it embeds its schema in its data. That makes it sometimes an order of magnitude larger, and it takes longer to parse.

If you want to drop JSON altogether, something like Protobufs would be better. But JSON + JSONSchema has all the benefits of XML and none of the drawbacks.

DonHopkins6• 5 years ago

XML DTDs were inherited from SGML. They can also be defined externally, but with internal links to them embedded in the document.

XML Schema were supposed to fix all the problems of DTDs, but they don't support unordered content, and have a host of their own problems. XML Schema are typically external XML documents referenced by an xsi:schemaLocation attribute, but apparently you can embed them too. But I don't know if that's a common practice, since it's a pretty bad idea for a lot of reasons:

https://www.herongyang.com/XML/XSD-Statements-Embedded-in-XM...

You raise a good point that it's a bad idea to embed schemas in documents, or even references to schemas in documents, because, as James Clark points out, magic schema attributes in documents (like xsi:schemaLocation) pre-suppose that there can be only one way of validating a document, they create security and interoperability problems, and it infects documents with the namespace of the grammar that you're using to validate them, when documents shouldn't depended on such knowledge, and be forced to include hot messes of namespace attributes like:

Schema Wars: XML Schema vs. RELAX NG (1/2) - exploring XML:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190403171512/http://webreferen...

James Clark, leader of the technical committee at OASIS for RELAX NG, and author of one of the first XML parsers, recently described the problems of the XML Schema language in a newsgroup posting: [...]
7) Magic schema attributes in documents
W3C XML Schema provides the xsi:schemaLocation attribute, which allows an XML document instance to indicate the schema that should be used to validate the document. This creates problems with security (the destination might have changed or tampered with), interoperability (use of schemaLocation is optional) and "purity" of schema definition: There is no way to prevent the document containing magic xsi:* attributes, so the use of W3C XML Schema "infects" the grammar you are defining.

Here's more of what he has to say about JSON in his blog post "XML vs the Web":

https://blog.jclark.com/2010/11/xml-vs-web_24.html

[...] From this perspective, my reaction to JSON is a combination of "Yay" and "Sigh".
It's "Yay", because for important use cases JSON is dramatically better than XML. In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this. The fundamental problem is the mismatch between programming language data structures and the XML element/attribute data model of elements. This leaves the developer with three choices, all unappetising:
- live with an inconvenient element/attribute representation of the data;
- descend into XML Schema hell in the company of your favourite data binding tool;
- write reams of code to convert the XML into a convenient data structure.
By contrast with JSON, especially with a dynamic programming language, you can get a reasonable in-memory representation just by calling a library function. [...]
There's a bigger point that I want to make here, and it's about the relationship between XML and the Web. When we started out doing XML, a big part of the vision was about bridging the gap from the SGML world (complex, sophisticated, partly academic, partly big enterprise) to the Web, about making the value that we saw in SGML accessible to a broader audience by cutting out all the cruft. In the beginning XML did succeed in this respect. But this vision seems to have been lost sight of over time to the point where there's a gulf between the XML community and the broader Web developer community; all the stuff that's been piled on top of XML, together with the huge advances in the Web world in HTML5, JSON and JavaScript, have combined to make XML be perceived as an overly complex, enterprisey technology, which doesn't bring any value to the average Web developer.
This is not a good thing for either community (and it's why part of my reaction to JSON is "Sigh"). XML misses out by not having the innovation, enthusiasm and traction that the Web developer community brings with it, and the Web developer community misses out by not being able to take advantage of the powerful and convenient technologies that have been built on top of XML over the last decade.
So what's the way forward? I think the Web community has spoken, and it's clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON. XML isn't going away but I see it being less and less a Web technology; it won't be something that you send over the wire on the public Web, but just one of many technologies that are used on the server to manage and generate what you do send over the wire.
In the short-term, I think the challenge is how to make HTML5 play more nicely with XML. In the longer term, I think the challenge is how to use our collective experience from building the XML stack to create technologies that work natively with HTML, JSON and JavaScript, and that bring to the broader Web developer community some of the good aspects of the modern XML development experience.

nly• 5 years ago

For many use cases, the way I'd do this these days is just to adopt Avro or Flatbuffers, or some other such format, and use it in JSON mode.

IshKebab2• 5 years ago

XML has two big problems:

1. It's super verbose. Everybody hates writing it. And yes, people do write JSON by hand.

2. It has a weird and confusing data model with both attributes and child elements. Do you do <foo a="1"/> or <foo><a>1</a></foo>? In many many cases it's ambiguous and you end up with a weird mix, whereas in JSON it's obvious and easy.

kevinmgranger4• 5 years ago

One shouldn't have to think about which features of a deserializer to enable or disable in order to avoid security issues.

jokoon• 5 years ago

I have to admit that I once used python repr() as a way to pass json data. It worked. I think.

eptcyka3• 5 years ago

I've heard horror stories from a friend who had to fix such code introduced by a contractor. Management didn't want to throw any of it awayz because they paid a lot of money to the contractor. Of course broke in a hard to debug fashion.

dapids• 5 years ago

It will work only as long as the object(s) interpreted by repr are serialzable by JSON, which is not a sound approach, unless you write a any-type serializer.

scanr• 5 years ago

The syntax for line breaks make it incompatible with JavaScript.

Probably not terrible because doing an eval of untrusted json would be a bad idea but they could have used back ticks which would have these useful properties:

- still JavaScript

- fewer characters

jenscow2• 5 years ago

Killer feature: comments.

Sure, for APIs comments are bad. However, for configuration things are so much better when you can document or temporarily remove things, without having hacks which pollute the data.

Trailing commas are also nice to have - although we have linters for that, unfortunately some people think they're too good to need a linter.

wmanley• 5 years ago

Trailing commas are also nice to have - although we have linters for that, unfortunately some people think they're too good to need a linter.

IMO the real value in trailing commas is that it's easier to produce simple JSON programmatically.

perfunctory• 5 years ago

No booleans?

zkldi• 5 years ago

It's a superset of JSON, so it should natively support true and false identifiers.

antihero• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't they follow ECMA and use backticks for multiline strings?

Ah, it's based on ECMAScript 5.1. I guess we can wait for a JSON6, then.

silvestrov• 5 years ago

I'd love if they added support for dates, e.g.

{ justDate: @2020-02-08 }

{ dateAndTime: @2007-03-01T13:00:00Z }

{ justTime: @@13:00:00 }

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

Well, that has nothing to do with "Javascript" notation So first get that kind of notation into javascript, then wait 15 years

lovasoa• 5 years ago

A JSON5 parser comes in handy for scraping, when you want to extract data that is embedded directly inside the javascript source of a website.

But I wouldn't ever use JSON5 over JSON for serialization, or over YAML for parsing a configuration file.

thefounder• 5 years ago

> by expanding its syntax to include some productions from ECMAScript 5.1.

I think at this point a new json spec should have little/nothing to do with javascript.

andix2• 5 years ago

Don't we already have Yet Another Markup Language (YAML)? :D

snshn• 5 years ago

what a piece of shit...

ralfn• 5 years ago

I like that it has a new name. I've seen too many stupid libraries support their own superset while still calling it JSON (looking at you, Python and .NET ecosystem!)

It's a standard. If we change it, it needs a new name..

However, I am worried that this new standard is harder for languages and ecosystems to support consistently, because it requires a much more involved parser.

Then again, if YAML can do it.. (and that must be a parser created in the depths of hell).

beardyw• 5 years ago

"JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format."

So says JSON.org for as long as anyone can remember.

Why is anyone caring about using single or double quotes, or wanting trailing commas? It solves no problems. It seems to me the only answer is it's for manually created JSON. That is, all of this is for people whose only exposure to JSON is doing some config in vscode. It adds nothing else.

Call it JSON-CONFIG and leave well enough alone.

SigmundA2• 5 years ago

Keep going, next sentence from JSON.org: "It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. "

Non-quoted keys is easier to read and write by humans, trailing commas are easier for a machine to write, single quotes can make it easier for a human to read or write. Comments help humans read and write.

I remember when it was javascript object notation and that stuff was allowed because thats what javascript allows and felt simple and effective for both human and machine, then it became strict json, what a step backwards.

coolgoose• 5 years ago

Regardless of how good this is or not, every time it pops up I just wonder if anybody actually gives a crap or not.

JSON is one of those formats that's "good enough" even if it's stinky and it's also universally accepted that a small iteration on it with small conveniences doesn't make that much sense imho.

spicybright2• 5 years ago

It's true. I doubt this spec will pick up even a little traction either since it's not backwards compatible.

You trade slightly more concrete data structures for hard incompatibility.

Maybe an internal api could leverage this in some way?

But it really isn't that hard to wrap hex, floating points, etc. in quotes and parse that server side.

Any application that's not a pet project should be using json schemas anyways, which is the layer you could put your custom datatypes into.

snorkel• 5 years ago

If I had to pick one feature add, it’d be allow trailing commas. That would make serializing a bit easier and less error prone.

colejohnson66• 5 years ago

It would also make slightly nicer diffs

tootie• 5 years ago

And XML is a very battle-tested alternative that supports every conceivable edge case and arbitrary depths of strictness and validation. There was soooo much energy poured in to making XML the One Format To Rule Them All. It has so many advanced features like strict definitions, includes syntax, support for mixed content, entities and references, comment syntax. But it turns out that 99% of users never needed any of that and just wanted nested key-value pairs.

kevinmgranger4• 5 years ago

That and any serialization format that has security implications is doomed to fail (or at least be derided).

thayne2• 5 years ago

JSON is "good enough" for a textual, mostly human readable data interchange format. But as a configuration format, for example the package.json file for node/npm/yarn, it is most definitely not "good enough". For two reasons: no comments and no multiline strings. The latter might not be important for some types of configuration, but it is for things that need something like a description that is more than a single sentence.

throw0101a• 5 years ago

But as a configuration format, for example the package.json file for node/npm/yarn, it is most definitely not "good enough".

Then perhaps don't use it for a use case it was not designed to address? I understand that JSON is a very handy hammer to have, but not all things are nails.

saurik• 5 years ago

It is just that people keep insisting on using JSON for human-maintained configuration files, and JSON sucks for that: no comments, trailing commas, or multi-line strings.

Since JSON5 is trivially pre-processed into JSON, it tends to be useful as a tack-on to such projects to let your startup scripts generate the real file given the useful on without having unrelated syntax.

spicybright2• 5 years ago

In practice, I've found most program configs allow comments and non quoted keys, for what it's worth.

hakre• 5 years ago

Previously on HN:

The JSON5 Data Interchange Format (https://spec.json5.org/) - 2 Years ago - 0 Comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21113613

udev• 5 years ago

Should've named it JackSON5.

kybernetikos5• 5 years ago

These days, JS has moved on while JSON has remained stuck in the past. There are some fairly important ones it'd be great to get a standard format for in JSON. e.g.

    JSON.stringify({z: 1n})

Also, round tripping ArrayBuffers, Maps, Sets, Symbols and Dates would be really useful. Sadly JSON5 doesn't address those.

I'd quite like a next gen JSON not to get upset on circular references too, although that would most likely require some sort of link or reference data type.

pitaj• 5 years ago

Bigints, dates, and buffers I can understand to a degree.

Sets can easily be serialized as a json array. Maps can be serialized as a json array of arrays or as a single json dictionary if the key types are compatible.

kybernetikos5• 5 years ago

Everything can be serialised as something else with various degress of difficulty, but one of the beauties of JSON was that it had support for most of the native types of javascript. It's nice not to have to write special logic to serialise / deserialise the way you want. In particular, the ability to round trip all the standard types would be really useful.

ltbarcly3• 5 years ago

If you're going to the trouble of using something not backwards compatible with json, use something that isn't crap.

avgcorrection• 5 years ago

Strings may span multiple lines by escaping new line characters.

What if the escape character comes before a trailing whitespace? Like this (`_` is whitespace):

    "hello,\_\n

Will that still escape the newline?

filoeleven• 5 years ago

Some luckier alternate universes have standardized on EDN instead.

https://github.com/edn-format/edn

elcritch• 5 years ago

Somewhat related, I was toying around with what an html5 based csv alternative could look like and called it hsv5 partly as a play on json5 and hdf5.

https://github.com/elcritch/hsv5

deepsun3• 5 years ago

Why only positive/negative infinity, but not positive/negative zero?

lamontcg• 5 years ago

JSON5 was proposed long before positive/negative zero got trendy on HN

deepsun3• 5 years ago

IEEE 754 had them for longer?

dang• 5 years ago

Past related threads:

JSON5 – a superset of JSON with comments, multiline string, trailing comma, etc. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22598401 - March 2020 (1 comment)

JSON5: JSON for humans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17375850 - June 2018 (3 comments)

JSON5 – JSON for the ES5 Era - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956943 - Jan 2016 (8 comments)

JSON5 is a proposed extension to JSON - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7325735 - March 2014 (246 comments)

Show HN: JSON5 — modern JSON - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4031699 - May 2012 (84 comments)

johnthescott• 5 years ago

"The standard has to be sufficiently simple that it makes sense to have multiple implementations." -James Clark

mindless_solips3• 5 years ago

These are the monsters who told us "XML is too bloated" and "who'd ever want a self-describing, self-transformable interchange format anyway?"

The more I see things like JSONSchema and JSON5 get away from Crockford's original overly simplistic syntax, the more I think we can all agree with Richard Gabriel. Worse Is Better!

JSON5 Data Interchange Format

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