Comment by drderidder

This spec has come up a couple times; the first time I wondered whether a simpler approach might be acceptable:

  * setting properties to be updated
  * omitting properties to be unchanged
  * explicitly setting 'undefined' properties to be deleted

I've used that approach and github seems to have done something similar. I like the idea of a patch spec for JSON - it's required by a strict implementation of REST with HTTP PATCH - but the proposals I've seen so far seem just beyond the ken of the forehead-slapping simplicity that everyone loves about the JSON format and the parse & stringify methods.