Why not use HJSON?

No longer supported

HJSON is no longer supported.

HJSON is an attempt at fixing the aforementioned lack of readability of JSON.

It has the following criticisms of YAML:

• JSON is easier to explain (compare the JSON and YAML specs).

• JSON is not bloated (it does not have anchors, substitutions or concatenation).

As with TOML's criticism, these are spot on. However, strictyaml fixes this by cutting out those parts of the spec, leaving something that is actually simpler than HJSON.

It has another criticism:

• JSON does not suffer from significant whitespace.

This is not a valid criticism.

Whitespace and indentation is meaningful to people parsing any kind of code and markup (why else would code which doesn't have meaningful whitespace use indentation as well?) so it should be meaningful to computers parsing.

There is an initial 'usability hump' for first time users of languages which have significant whitespace that were previously not used to significant whitespace but this isn't especially hard to overcome - especially if you have a propery configured decent editor which is explicit about the use of whitespace.

Python users often report this being a problem, but after using the language for a while usually come to prefer it since it keeps the code shorter and makes its intent clearer.