Very popular plain text data exchange format.
Currently specified in by two competing standards:
- IETF RFC4627: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt (2006)
- ECMA-404: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-404.pdf
JSON is based on EcmaScript 3 literal notation. For this reason it is specially popular amongst the JavaScript community.
It is however not a strict subset of JavaScript object only because it can contain two characters that JavaScript cannot: http://timelessrepo.com/json-isnt-a-javascript-subset and JSON creator said:
JSON is done. JSON will not be revised.