If you have ideas or comments on the design of the format, please let me know! I've been working on this for 3 years and am getting close to release, but there are always blind spots when working alone.

The basic premise is that you can never marry "easy to edit" with "efficient to process". They pull in opposing directions, so the only alternative is to have two 100% compatible formats: one in text and one in binary.

I've chosen the data types carefully to support the most common types that come up in real world situations (and have included custom type support for data not intended for public consumption). The compromises made should allow most people to work without adding extra encoding on top of the encoding (base64, special text parsing and such).

The reference implementation is working for all common cases, and mostly there for array types. Once that's finished, I'll start on the schema design.