OT: Less-restrictive alternative to XML and XML visualizers?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Christopher Wright" <dhasenan at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:gk99av$atd$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> I have a need for an inexpensive (preferably freeware or open-source, 
>> obviously), alternate to using XML and an XML viewer (such as 
>> MindFusion's XML Viewer). The main problem with XML is that I need 
>> something that will allow node names to contain any arbitrary text 
>> character (or at least just the ascii symbols such as parentheses, comma, 
>> etc). Any ideas?
>
> JSON strings are a lot less restrictive than XML strings. If that's your 
> main requirement, JSON will probably serve.

Just looked at the JSON example on Wikipedia, I'm impressed so far. It seems 
to fix the main syntactical complaints I have with XML (overly verbose, 
limitations on names). There seems to be a decent opensource viewer here: 
http://www.codeplex.com/JsonViewer

I don't suppose you know of a general-use tool that would let me provide a 
text file and a tree (JSON, XML, or anything else) that describes a 
particular parsing of the text file (obviously including indicies into the 
original text file for each node, or something like that) and lets you 
select one thing on one side and have it highlight the corresponding portion 
on the other side?  Ie, like this:

Source Frame: (Quotes indicate the selection)
(1 + "(2 * 3)") % 4

Tree Frame: (Quotes indicate the selection)
%
|-- +
|   |-- 1
|   |-- "*"
|   |   |-- 2
|   |   |-- 3
|-- 4

Then again, that could be a good exercise for trying out DWT.