Json dates, times, and binary data

If I had to pick one thing I would change about the JSON spec it's this: they should allow timestamps and dates as primitive values. It's a very common complaint. Another thing they should have provided for is binary data. This gets a bit annoying if you convert a record containing a bytea to json and hand it to the client. They see a string like '\x71951ce4c84c0b4de861377f27a4938a'. If you can, it's probably nicer to encode your bytea before converting it to json, using encode(mybytea,'base64') or encode(mybytea,'hex'). Then your client might see a string for which they have a standard routine to convert to binary, rather than having to strip off the the initial '\x' before converting it.