Do I get this right that jQuery, for developer convenience, content-sniffs the value of "data-" attributes?

I.e., if the value looks like JSON, it will parse it and return the object tree, otherwise it will return the original value as a string?

This sounds like a horrible idea in general - I'd say the authors of this forgetting that certain english words by themselves are valid JSON is a nice cherry on top but hardly the worst problem caused by this.