Subject: CVS $25 Cash-Back (Redeem)

From: CVS Voucher Code <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 10:46:52 -0700

Redeem your CVS Gift Card ......

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2. Then you claim your card. Details for eligibility are on the site.

3. You can enjoy $25 worth of merchandise from  on us. 
Whether you are already a member, or this will be your first time visiting. 

http://www.troughtar.com/cvs/pharm/rewards.shtml 
Card #-164439

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You can keep on claiming your personal opinion as a fact but that does not make it so. Your claim that all metadata ought to be data is just nonsense; most other text formats recognize this much (XML and YAML have comments): adding specific data is additional burden that ALL processors of the content must take into account; there is always a cost to a feature. Comment is developer-readable textual annotation, and as such should not be  I believe I'm backing up everything I say with facts, so as not to make it just my personal opinion. If there's anything I haven't backed up sufficiently, let me know. "Your claim that all metadata ought to be data is just nonsense" No, you're demonstrably wrong here. The only reason to include metadata, I think, is so it can be parsed. If it's going to be parsed, then just make it real data, not comments. Do you have a use case in mind "most other text formats recognize this much (XML and YAML have comments)" XML and YAML are designed for files; JSON 
 was simply extracted from JavaScript, and I think it makes a horrible file syntax (YAML and even XML work better in this case). It's true that JSON files may occasionally need comments, but JSON files are themselves a  "adding specific data is additional burden that ALL processors of the content must take into account" Again, no. JSON is structured; if a data element in a JSON packet is to be ignored, the processor doesn't even need to think about it. "Comment is developer-readable textual annotation, and as such should not be structured" Why do you need comments in JSON, unless you're using JSON files (which is a bad idea as indicated above)? You certainly don't need them in streams. (Actually, needing comments at all is usually a sign of a design problem.) 
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My canonical use case are log files that are streamed over to be aggregated or stored; so stream/file distinction is virtual and transient. As to skipping: all properties are visible, and there are two main ways to deal with it -- (a) classical, you must know what everything is (to the degree at least that you can skip it), or (b) "anything goes", i.e. just use what you know. It is only trivial to skip metadata in latter case. But I see that you can not conceive of the simple notion of diagnostics-only comments -- no point in arguing past each other here.