Comment by gtrubetskoy

For the life of me I do not understand the JSON obsession. When I was young and naive, JSON indeed looked cool because it is both human and computer readable. Until you run into some of its limitations.

For example, AFAIK there is still no agreement on how to handle binary data, e.g. what do you do with:

  >>> json.dumps(["\xb8\xc3\xb6\xbb"])
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xb8 in position 0: invalid start byte

You can base64-encode it or do a number of other things, but then that's outside the JSON standard, and suddenly it isn't the flexible encoding standard it seemed at first...