Douglas Crockford Is Not Your Dad

I know what you've been told. Douglas Crockford said that JSON can't have comments. And you accepted that. Understandable mistake; we've all been there.

But I'm here to tell you there's another way, because Douglas Crockford is not your dad. You can put comments in JSON files if you know they're going to be read only by a reasonable parser. If you maintain a parser, you can make it accept comments, and nothing bad¹ will happen!

Reasonable Parsers

These ones will just do the right thing with no fuss:

• dkjson (Lua)
• SQLite
• JSON5 (JavaScript)
• TODO: list more

Not Completely Unreasonable Parsers

These ones can be configured to accept comments:

• Jackson (Java)
• Apple JSONDecoder (Swift)
• System.Text.JSON (.NET)

Unreasonable Parsers

These ones have not yet seen the light:

• Emacs json-parse-string.