It's democratic, and for the people. It says nothing about being a totalitarian dictatorship.
Not everything is/does what it says on the tin. You don't have to agree with official or otherwise authoritative sources without question.
(not that I wish in any way to compare Mr Crockford or whoever runs json.org with DPRK or its leadership - I'm just using a deliberatly extreme example to highlight that what is written may not be what is, at least not from absolutely everyone's point of view)
I generally do, thanks, though I'm not any sort of genius by any measure.
> because in context, this is far too inapplicable to the discussed reality of JSON to be an actual point.
You seem to be missing a bit of an intentional context switch. The comment was more about the logic of the GP's response to "<something> isn't really X" which was "yes <something> is X, it says so on <something>'s home page", than it was about <something> or X in particular.
So it was relevant in the context of the discussion and the facts being used for reference but not, as you call out, in the context of the subject of the discussion (hence my somewhat defensive clarification of intent in the last sentence)
"lightweight data interchange format" is not the same as "serialization formats".
For one, serialization usually handles binary data as well. And types, lots of types. Serialization includes class definitions, etc, which are used to create a (in this case) python object. JSON is literally javascript object notation, and has nothing to do with pickling python.
Serialization doesn't have to handle a particular type system in its entirety to be serialization.
A serialization scheme can dictate its own type system; which can be smaller than that of the programming languages which support that serialization scheme.
JSON has a simple type system; it serializes that system.
(Might you be confusing serialization for other concepts like object store databases, or image saving?)
That's the source that pressed it into service: JSON is exactly what it says it is: Javascript Object Notation. Specifically, it's a subset of javascript's, well, object notation.
The point is, the syntax behind JSON was originally designed for a specific language, as a textual representation of that language's objects. It just happened to make a convenient serialization format.
http://json.org/
It's nothing about pressing into service. This is the authoritative source.