Should the spec define what JSON spec we adhere to?

[Zegnat]

The parsing specification builds an dictionary object in JSON syntax, but it never defines how to handle encodings etc.

There are several JSON standards out there, some better defined than others. It might be worth pinning microformats to one of them so parsers outputting JSON will all be compatible with the same consumers. To this end it might be good to specify RFC 7493 as our flavour of JSON, as it is “designed to maximize interoperability”.

For some of the history behind the several JSON standards, I refer to this piece by Tim Bray and the links therein. He too writes:

[…] I ac­tu­al­ly don’t rec­om­mend 8259, I rec­om­mend I-JSON, RFC 7493, which de­scribes ex­act­ly the same syn­tax as all the oth­er specs (by ref­er­enc­ing 7159), but ex­plic­it­ly rules out some legal-but-dumbass things you could do that might break your pro­to­col, […]