[brentashley]

Douglas built the JSON spec

1) to be language agnostic. Following ES5's syntax directions is fine for ES5 focused development, possibly not for others.

2) to be final - i.e. there is no version number. If you want to extend or build something else, I am fairly certain Douglas would prefer that you call it something else. See http://inkdroid.org/journal/2012/04/30/lessons-of-json/ at 5:30 in the video.

Don't take these points as criticisms, I too would like to be able to use single quotes and trailing commas and everything else here. I think though that in order to work with JSON as a static spec, an alternative approach could be to have your project be a layer like HAML, SASS or CoffeeScript. Each of those tools compiles or transforms to conforming input for their target specs rather than replacing them.

[aseemk]

JSON5 is also meant to be language-agnostic. It derives its syntax from ES5 in the same way that JSON derived its syntax from ES3.

I'm aware that JSON is final — it's my hope that a new format that's easier to write (whether this or something else) picks up steam — but thanks for the feedback on the name! I consciously used a different file extension (.json5) to avoid conflicts; hopefully that's a good start.

I already use (and love) CoffeeScript, but my motivation for building this was to have tools use it natively, so that sibling files in a different format wouldn't have to be maintained alongside the needed JSON.