I lean towards wanting all my tools to support at least one common structured format (and JSON generally would seem the best supported) these days. It'd be great if there was a "standard" environment variable to toggle JSON input/output on for apps. If you did that, then e.g. a "structured" shell could just default to turning that on, and try detecting JSON on output and offering according additional functionality.
That'd be a tolerable graduated approach where you get benefits even if not every tool support it.
With "jq", I'm already increasingly leaning on JSON for this type of role.
It'd need to be very non-invasive, though, or all kinds of things are likely to break.
> It'd be great if there was a "standard" environment variable to toggle JSON input/output on for apps.
Look at FreeBsd's libxo. It's supported by most of the base system.
It looks like libxo does the output in structured format, but what about input? (For chaining commands together with pipes). Did the FreeBsd porting work[1] implement the input side with libxo, independently of libxo, or not at all?
(Not to diminish libxo --it looks pretty cool, and I didn't know about it before-- just curious.)