[mercurial]

Yes, yes. And we could also have everything as binary. Now, UNIX people decided long ago to use plain text to communicate between processes, mostly because it's infinitely easier to read - and makes it possible to edit by hand if you need to. Have to interface with a REST API which consumes JSON and you want to do some testing? Open your text editor anywhere curl is installed, and you're done. That's pretty damn convenient.

[optymizer]

We can't have everything as binary, because us humans can't even agree on which bit is most significant out of a list of 64/32/16/8 bits.

[Zikes]

Also becoming commonplace as a config file format.

[mercurial]

Yeah. On the other hand, I find YAML much better for this kind of thing. JSON is readable and writable by hand, but it's not terribly nice.

[Zikes]

No doubt they both have their benefits, however in an environment particularly suited for working with JSON, like node.js, the additional overhead of a YAML (or other) parser may not be desirable.

[mercurial]

Why not? After all, since JSON is not a proper Javascript subset, you still need to parse it somehow. And as JSON is a proper subset of YAML, you should get by with a YAML parser.

[Ygg2]

I think JSON being a subset of yaml is one of THE biggest mistakes YAML made, second only to making YAML a serialization format.