It makes perfect sense -- if you provide a freeform content section of an otherwise strictly formed document (for interoperability reasons), then people will abuse it to store arbitrary, uninteroperable data (as was seen with binary blobs being dumped into XML).
The point of a standardized serialization format is well-defined parsing semantics and universal interoperability.
>It makes perfect sense -- if you provide a freeform content section of an otherwise strictly formed document (for interoperability reasons), then people will abuse it to store arbitrary, uninteroperable data (as was seen with binary blobs being dumped into XML).
That will then be their own bloody problem, not Crockfords.
Except that in practice, this has just meant that people have defined their own ad-hoc extensions to JSON that add support for comments, since it's so useful for stuff like JSON-formatted config files.
The point of a standardized serialization format is well-defined parsing semantics and universal interoperability.