I'd like to know the first guy to send json over the wire starting the ajax craze.
Unfortunately I don't remember who those people were, but anyone who used XmlHttpRequest, which was apparently there in the 90's, could have used it.
The Ajax craze was, of course, with XML (ie, the X in Ajax). JSON is certainly a more pleasant format to work with but not a huge leap over XML. But it was lame that XML was melded on such as it was.
It's a dreary business trying to analyze humor, even more so to analyze what kind of humor plays well at Hacker News, but I'd say the more original the joke, and the more the joke makes you think afterward, the better it will do.
As an aside, my goodness, this is such an HN comment.
Douglas Crockford's brilliant move was to create the web site http://json.org/ By putting the ".org" at the end he tricked the world into believing it was an accepted standard.
CSV is still probably more compact than JSON even when compressed, but the difference isn't nearly as much as you'd expect from the raw textual version.
Of course it gets expanded back to the full text in the browser, but that gets parsed and discarded right away.
When I read CSV in JavaScript, for convenience I usually end up converting it to in-memory objects that resemble the JSON object that I would have downloaded otherwise. So at least in that case there isn't much difference in memory use either.
Example (CSV):
name,age
James,32
Nina,10
Helga,90
{"fields":["name","age"],
"content":[
["James",32],
["Nina",10],
["Helga",90]
]}
JSON's standard is that it should be able to be eval'd by javascript interpreter. Even then, date handling is less than ideal.