title: Is there any practical reason to use quoted strings for JSON keys?
body: <p>According to Crockford's <a href="http://www.json.org/" rel="noreferrer">json.org</a>, a JSON <em>object</em> is made up of <em>members</em>, which is made up of <em>pairs</em>.</p>
  
  <p>Every pair is made of a <em>string</em> and a <em>value</em>, with a <em>string</em> being defined as:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>A string is a sequence of zero or more
    Unicode characters, wrapped in double
    quotes, using backslash escapes. A
    character is represented as a single
    character string. A string is very
    much like a C or Java string.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>But in practice most programmers don't even know that a JSON key should be surrounded by double quotes, because most browsers don't require the use of double quotes.</p>
  
  <p>Does it make any sense to bother surrounding your JSON in double quotes?</p>
  
  <p>Valid Example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
    "keyName" : 34
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As opposed to the invalid:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
     keyName : 34
  }
  </code></pre>