Date: 2020mar22 Q. Alternatives to JSON for config files A. JSON is really unfriendly for human editing. Its fine for program-to-program communication. But has some issues when humans might be involved: - Overly verbose (eg you need to quote variable names - "name":"Dave") - Only doublequotes, no single quotes (which makes quoting text with double quotes messy) - No comments - Trailing commas are strictly forbidden If you are making a file that will be seen or editing by humans consider something better. Relaxed JSON (RJSON) http://www.relaxedjson.org TOML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOML JSON5 https://json5.org JSONNET https://jsonnet.org YAML (Not so great because whitespace is significant) http://yaml.org/ Markdown (But most for documents) https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet javaScript (BAD) javaScript supports comments and is more lenient than JSON. But can only be imported with eval() which is dangerous.