[euroderf]

Sure. Make metadata out-of-band rather than in-band, so that the ungovernable mess of Unix-standard plain ol' text streams is replaced by structured data.

So, well then: allowing programs to consume and emit JSON - is this progress ?

[leoc]

JSON is hardly the greatest structured format, but nearly anything is better than Unix text streams.

[somat]

I think having a plain byte stream is actually better, in a worse is better sort of scenario.

A plain byte stream can be easily aligned to work with any future or past encoding fashion. Consider the situation if them that designed unix had not been so aggressively minimal. We would probably be complaining how streams had to be ASN1 encoded and how much a pain it is to define the schema for what should be a simple ad-hoc data transfer.

As it stands, you can put whatever object format you want on top of the stream. I think it is the same with the files. I am sort of pleased we are not stuck with some obsolete no longer relevant, screwball structured format from the 70's that all our file have to conform to. instead our file are a simple range of bytes and we can impose whatever structure on them that we want.

[euroderf]

I'm thinking that if a range of XML markups can delimit and separate out metadata (e.g. HTML head v body), then heck so can JSON. Maybe not prettily.

[ElectricalUnion]

To me the advantage of XML in this would be CDATA segments, that can represent (almost) any text (that isn't the CDATA terminator string) without requiring text escape hell. And if some sort of JSON supported said CDATA, well, it is no longer JSON.