JSON is the de facto standard when it comes to (un)serialising and exchanging data in web and mobile programming. 

I disagree. Take protobuf for example. You get schemas, data structures, and a parser in one package which is actually a lot smaller than JSON and compiles to nearly all the commonly used languages. Ever since I've started using it my life became so easier! If you don't want your data to be human readable (which is very common) you should not use JSON as a data interchange format.