[bhangi]

So the objection to JSON comes down to a couple of things: no comments and fragility in face of a trailing comma. I wonder if the right thing though would be to fix JSON (maybe even call it something else) rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Personally, of course, I think we should just use a slightly modified version of s-exprs which would be easier to parse.

(:keyword value)

where value can be an atom, list of atoms or a list of keyword value pairs. Comments could follow the Lisp convention and start with semi-colon and end with newline. Only 5 characters to escape, namely, '(', ')', ':', ' ' and ';'.