Alas, there's no guarantee that the order of key/value pairs within an object will be preserved (not even within JS anymore!). But that's okay, we can always reformat the ordered data as an array or write a custom parser ... oh.

I don't see any reason to include parsing directives in JSON either, but it's a wild world out there and people do all sorts of strange things. Seems that a few of those folks were working at Yahoo and made the mistake of letting Doug see their code when JSON was in prototype phase, so no JSON comments for anyone. Whoops!