JSON
JavaScript Object Notation — a lightweight, text-based data interchange format derived from a subset of JavaScript syntax, standardized as ECMA-404 and RFC 8259.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a text format for structured data built from six constructs: objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans, and null. It was popularized by Douglas Crockford, who registered json.org in 2002 and published a one-page grammar; Crockford has said he discovered rather than invented it, since it falls out of JavaScript's object literal syntax. RFC 4627 codified it in 2006, ECMA-404 in 2013, and RFC 8259/STD 90 in 2017. JSON's appeal is structural minimalism: a parser fits on a business card, browsers can deserialize it natively via JSON.parse, and the shape of the data is immediately visible to a human reader. Its limitations are equally well known — no native date type, no comments, no schema in the base spec (though JSON Schema and OpenAPI fill the gap), and no canonical form for signing. Despite these gaps it became the dominant format for REST API payloads, configuration files, NoSQL document stores like MongoDB, and log lines. JSON's displacement of XML for public web APIs is one of the cleaner examples of developer-experience minimalism beating feature richness.