Comment by zzo38computer

> you have only the fundamental datatypes as a requirement

Not really; the set of datatypes has problems. It uses Unicode, not binary data and not non-Unicode text. Numbers are usually interpreted as floating point numbers rather than integers, which can also be a problem. Keys can only be strings. And, other problems. So, the data types are not very good.

And, since it is a text format, it means that escaping is required.

> And while you have to write type converters all the time for datetime, BLOBs etc.

Not having a proper data type for binary means that you will need to encode it using different types and then avoids the benefit of JSON, anyways. So, I think JSON is not as helpful.

I think DER is better (you do not have to use all of the types; only the types that you are using is necessary to be implemented, because the format of DER makes it possible to skip anything that you do not care about), and I made up TER which is text based format which can be converted to DER (so, even though a binary data is represented as text, it is still representing the binary data type, rather than needing to use the wrong data type like JSON does).

> And you can complain or explain with JSON: "Comments not a feature?! WTF!" - Add a field with the key "comment"

But then it is a part of the data, which you might not want.