JSON5 – JSON for Humans

I think it allows for too much. I was glad that JSON only supports double-quoted strings. It is a feature that removes discussions about which quotes to use. Or even whether to use quotes at all (we still need them for keys with colons or minus in it, so what gives?). The only thing that JSON is really missing are comments and trailing commas. I use JSONC for that. It's what VSC uses for the config format and it works.

As much as i would like to see comments in json: if we start throwing around json files that area not really json, but we call them json, (at least in everyday talk), we will end up breaking more apps then we fix. Maybe the question is instead; why the hell do we need comments (and loosening of t he syntax, etc) in the first place? Are we seriously going to keep insisting on json as a configuration format? As…

> "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

This may be a bit too late. I hope people adopt it, but really, after avoiding other formats for a while I have to admit - json is not human read/write-able. It's a serialisation format, a bit more friendly and simpler than xml. I'll take yaml for config files any day instead. Json being a valid yaml is also good, because it makes migration trivial.