Hacker News Reader

I think what's wrong with JSON is you have to quote the field-names. That makes it unreadable and easy to create typos.

Why are the quotes needed? It would be a simply change in the spec if names without spaces in them could be expressed without quotes.

View on HN

It's even more puzzling since those quotes are not required in JavaScript...

JSON was created as the lowest common denominator between multiple ancient javascript engines. At one time, at least one browser couldn't handle keywords being used as unquoted object keys, so JSON just has all keys quoted for simplicity. It's the same deal with trailing commas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com