[conradev]

Sounds a lot like Apple's property list format, which shares almost everything you listed in common, except for annotations and symbol tables.

Its binary format was introduced in 2002!

Edit: Property lists only support integers up to 128 bits in size and double-precision floating point numbers. On top of those, Ion also supports infinite precision decimals.

[JonathonW]

Plists are nifty, but the text format's XML-based, which makes it too complex and too verbose to be a general-purpose alternative to something like JSON.

(plutil "supports" a json format, but it's not capable of expressing the complete feature set of the XML or binary formats.)

[pjmlp]

I don't get this gripe with XML, it is meant to be used by tools not to be written by hand.

Where is the XPath and XQuery for JSON?

Do people really think that manually iterating over the whole JSON document to find the data or writing yet another parser, is better?

[jon-wood]

http://jmespath.org/

[pjmlp]

Any solid Java, C#, C++ libraries?

[bct]

The XML serialization Apple defined for plists is awful and not easy to query with XPath.

[jonhohle]

Like Property Lists the binary format is TLV encoded as well. Ion has a more compact binary representation for the same data and additional types and metadata. Also, IIRC, Plist types are limited to 32-bit lengths for all data types. The binary Ion representation has no such restriction (though in practice sizes are often limited by the language implementation).