JSON5 – JSON for the ES5 Era

json5.org

6 points·nikolay··8 comments

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.

> escape sequences aren’t yet supported

Does this mean you can't even include a quote character in a string? If so this is kind of useless so far.

In my view, better than Hjson [0] as any JSON is a valid JSON5 unlike with Hjson [0], CSON [1], and the likes.

[0]: http://hjson.org/

[1]: https://github.com/bevry/cson

You got that wrong. Any JSON is also valid Hjson.

Not sure how I got that wrong, but, yeah, you're right! I still prefer JSON5 for being ECMAScript-compliant.

Personally, I've never been bothered by any of the issues solved here. On the other hand, I miss dates and datetimes everyday...

If you recall, people wrote languages in XML in the past only because it was easy. Now, people do this in YAML and to some degree in JSON, too. In this case, comments are essential - even for configurations. The biggest shortcoming of JSON is the lack of comments. Everything else is not such a huge issue.

There's another format by googlers - Jsonnet [0], but it's really too much, and it's a further departure from common sense - they picked "local" vs "let" and came up with their own Standard Library instead of using a subset of ECMAScript.

[0]: http://jsonnet.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com