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Agreed. Just adding some fixed types doesn't really help that much.

Something like EDN for JSON would be cool: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

Isn't Transit basically EDN for JSON in that it adds types and whatnot, and encodes to JSON?

Or do you mean, you want a format that's sort of halfway between EDN and JSON?

transit works great except that it's unreadable with current tools (for example browser devtools or attaching listeners to kafka).

I know it's a tool problem but I don't see the whole world embracing transit.

If this format gets adopted with extensible types we get a readable format that has what transit provides and if there's no tooling support we can still read it with standard json tools or none at all.

Transit is unreadable exactly because it has to work around the limitations of JSON (like string-only keys) to deliver its primary features: true maps, tagged collections etc. TJSON only has tags for primitives, so yeah, it's not much different from JSON this way, the tooling is happy.

> Just adding some fixed types doesn't really help that much.

It brings the set of scalar types you can express in a JSON message on par with other serialization formats like Protobufs:

https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3

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