[silvertab]

"An appeal to authority is an argument from the fact that a person judged to be an authority affirms a proposition to the claim that the proposition is true."

I don't think the person you replied to was claiming that DEC64 was good or bad because it was written by Crockford? Didn't feel like he was passing any judgement, merely pointing out who the author was...

[Pacabel]

Rightly or wrongly, Crockford is seen as somewhat of a "god" among the JavaScript crowd, due to his "JavaScript: The Good Parts" book and his work on JSON. Within that crowd, he's seen to posses an extremely high amount of authority. So I think that many of them would see this other work as superior based on his involvement alone, without investigating the ideas and proposals themselves any further.