I don't believe the original purpose of JSON was to eval untrusted objects, since that would always have posed a security risk. It did however offer a very easy standard way to share and parse data back in 1999. In 2016, I believe continued backwards compatibility is a necessity; otherwise you are just creating a new data storage format. So removing commas doesn't seem like an acceptable improvement, especially when the recommendation comes out of a necessity due to human error while hand-editing. JSON is incredibly easy to read and write by hand, in comparison with XML it is far easier to parse and traverse through code do its significantly simplified structure. If however, you need more functionality, switch to a different format; why bother trying to mangle or force JSON to work where it doesn't. There are other technologies and standards out there, use them.