Can JSON be made easily and safely editable by the non-technical Excel crowd?
- by glitch
I'm looking for a data storage format that's very intuitive and easy to edit. It should be ideally targeted towards the same crowd as Excel. At the same time I would like the data structure to be a tree. Ideally this would be JSON, since it offers both the tree aspect and allows for more interesting constructs like arrays. That and parsing libraries for JSON are ubiquitous, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
The problem is that, at least with a non-specialized text editor, JSON is a giant pain to edit for a non-technical user. I'm thinking along the lines of someone who might have used Excel in the past, but never a real text editor. Someone who might not be comfortable with the idea of preserving JSON syntax by hand.
Are there data formats out there that would fit this profile? I'd very much prefer this to be a JSON actually, but then it would require a solid editing tool that would hide the underlying implementation from the user. Think Excel and how it abstracts CSV syntax from the user.
The reason I'm looking for something like this is because the team has been working with pretty hierarchical data for a while now and we've hit the limits of how easy it is to represent in simple CSVs without having to create complex rules for how represent hierarchy semantics from each row.
Any suggestions?
