It's a wasteful, textual format derived from a programming language vomited forth in under a week. It has asinine integer characteristics for no good reason; it's not a random-access format; validating it is even more work; hash table keys that appear multiple times, instead of being in error, instead overwrite each other, defeating most any kind of optimization; it is thus wildly inefficient to manipulate, as manipulating it correctly in all cases requires full and comprehensive parsing with checking. It is an asinine ''format''.
>It's a text format that can be inspected by humans, unlike binary formats.
Even then, there are much better textual formats that could be used, but I'm of the opinion that numerical (binary) formats are strictly superior, especially as they're used increasingly often. It's better to have good tools that will provide a human-readable representation, rather than pretend a single, inefficient representation for both man and machine is somehow the best option.
>(Maybe IMAP is a text format too, so this isn't an advantage inherently) And JMAP may have better semantics than IMAP, and there's nothing inherently wrong with JSON (other than edge cases).
Computer programs written by anyone competent are built around edge cases; that's much of what any reliable program is, accounting for edge cases. To disregarded edge cases, of which there are many in JSON, speaks to me that you have little concern for writing software correctly, but I imagine you'd deny this, as who doesn't want to write correct software? Simply understand that using a format with so many edge cases and other defects as JSON is foolhardy for much of anything.