JSON
JSON is a way of describing any kind of artifact in a human-readable format, that is also easily parsed by JavaScript. Because of the convenience of using this format, many programming languages now have implementations to parse and render objects in JSON.
There are a few variants on JSON, one that has the same concept, but encodes it as a binary string (which is more efficient) and one that does something with cross-domains.
A format that addresses the same problem as JSON is YAML. YAML is typically easier to read by humans, you can describe the same objects, and you can have comments inside a YAML-file that are not part of the object declaration. This is at the cost of that this format depends on the indentation of each individual line, which could make it hard to read and modify if the object has many levels.
Advantages
- Data can take any form (including arrays, and nested elements)
- Widely accepted
- Supported by pretty much any Programming Language
Disadvantages
- No schema enforcing
- File can be big because of repeated key names
- Doesn’t support comments