I'm really baffled here. Look at the definition at json.org. â An object is an UNORDERED set of name/value pairs. Or look at ECMA-404, which json.org points to. The JSON syntax does not impose any restrictions on the strings used as names ... and DOES NOT ASSIGN ANY SIGNIFICANCE TO THE ORDERING. When you say that "it is pretty clear that the order is important for that format" I fail to understand you. It is absolutely clear that by design the order is NOT important or even significant for JSON. JSON Pointer does not provide any way to refer to order in an "object": /2 applied to an object will look for the name "2" as a string. JSONPath does not provide any way to refer to order in an "object": [2] applied to an object will look for the name "2" as a string. JSON Schema does not provide any way to constrain or refer to order in an "object". As for databases, Postgres documentation says of JSONB that "Insignificant whitespace is discarded, and the order of object keys is not preserved." If you are communicating with someone else who is using pseudo-JSON that does attach semantics to the order of the name/value pairs, then of course you do whatever you have to in order to communicate successfully. Just don't think of it as JSON. If you have two programs whose protocol you control, again you can use JSON syntax with different semantics all you want. Just don't think of it as JSON. Heck, if it is important to you to distinguish between integer 1 and floating point 1.0, you can add your own semantics if you like, but *JSON* doesn't distinguish them. As for MongoDB, it works with BSON (which is richer than JSON. which is why "MongoDB Extended JSON exists), and does some seriously odd things, like regarding {} and {"a": null} as equal. (According to the 3.6 manual.) Do whatever you have to do to get the job done, but just remember that most JSON tools think they are dealing with *JSON*, not something else that looks like it but has different semantics, and can be relied on to preserve or respect *JSON* semantics, not some other semantics unknown to them.