I will never understand the tendency, especially in the web community, to consider complicated, ambiguous, inconsistent, and difficult to parse syntaxes as "friendly".<p>It might seem like a good idea at first, but over time it just results in a culture that publishes horrifically broken markup, and increasingly baroque implementations that try to work around every possible screw-up instead of simply flagging errors. This is, in my opinion, the biggest screw-up of the web: if early browsers simply flagged errors and pointed out where and what they are clearly, the web would be a much nicer place. Instead, actually writing a parser for web markup is a nearly impossible task, and not the weekend hack it should be.<p>One of the, if not the, great thing(s) about JSON is its beautifully simple syntax. 5 images on json.org precisely explain what it is, and that's that. You can write a parser for it in basically any language without any fancy libraries or frameworks in a few hours. That is a good thing, regardless of whether you personally would ever have to do such a thing, because it keeps the barrier of entry low and trickles through the ecosystem in positive ways.<p>Missing the point of JSON? Yes, but missing much more, including lessons that should have been learned.<p>That said, a few of the ideas are good ones (comments and such), but the bad ones (making crucial delimiters optional) are so bad they more than outweigh the benefits.