I call BS. You can still pass custom parsing directives in an initial &quot;meta&quot; section or out-of-band.<p>Heck, you can even pass custom parsing directives in comments inside the JSON document (the very thing Douglas wanted to avoid), since your receiver knows to expect them, read them, and then continue parsing accordingly.<p>The only people this annoys is people actually wanting legitimate comments in a JSON document for documentation (and not for passing parsing options).