Why do people keep inventing new object serialisations when there is already JSON and XML? Why do people think that a custom format and parser would be better than an industry standard and a parser that has years of development improvements? :-S

How would you teach / punish these people?

I have a co-worker who will attempt to solve any problem with a custom serialisation format.

He will then defend his choice by embedding his crazy ~ and ; delimited format in to a JSON object with one field:

{
myData: "Foo~Bar;Baz~Spedoinkle;etc"
}

And say, "but it's just JSON, what's wrong?"

@fuckfuckityfuck exactly my problem. The custom serialised string is added to a JSON object.