I'm building a "thing" that is supposed to use JSON 'documents' as its building blocks, providing various (pluggable) storage backends and presentation frontends. Non-techie/semi-techie (frontend dev, web dev, etc.) compatibility is needed, which is why I want to keep the data model "simple" and dynamically typed. Anyway, one thing I'm running up against is that I am going to need ordered key/value collections, which I believe is something JSON does not support out-of-the-box: "objects" ({"foo":15, "bar":23}) are conceptually unordered key/value collections (and Aeson treats them as such, using hash maps as the intermediate storage format), so I lose ordering; OTOH, flat lists ([15, 23]) do not have keys, and lists of "pairs" (two-element lists) produce uglier syntax ([["foo",15], ["bar",23]]), but they are the "correct" solution. Ideally, someone is going to step up and tell me that both I and Aeson have misunderstood JSON, and objects are really supposed to be ordered after all, in which case I'd need an alternative to Aeson (or someone needs to patch it?). Or I could bite the bullet and go with [["foo",15], ["bar",23]]. Or I could ditch JSON as the canonical format and go with something custom, or, shudder, XML. Thoughts? Hints? Ideas? - Tobias (tdammers on freenode)