Why JSON API Specification suggest use of hyphen/minus to separate words in member names?

Question

According to recommendation on JSON API specification site, we should use all lower case member names in JSON separated by hyphens:

The allowed and recommended characters for an URL safe naming of members are defined in the format spec. To also standardize member names, the following (more restrictive) rules are recommended:

Member names SHOULD start and end with the characters "a-z" (U+0061 to U+007A) Member names SHOULD contain only the characters "a-z" (U+0061 to U+007A), "0-9" (U+0030 to U+0039), and the hyphen minus (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, "-") as separator between multiple words.

So basically, we should be using JSON like this:

{
    "first-name": "Jason",
    "last-name": "Tough"
}

Would not it make it cumbersome to access those properties in JavaScript? Or any other programming language for that matter, especially if we want to generate classes from JSON Schema?

What is the motivation behind this recommendation?

Answer 1

Looks like JSONAPI naming from the quote in question is no longer valid. Currently the `JSONAPI recommends:

Naming

The specification places certain hard restrictions on how members (i.e., keys) in a JSON:API document may named. To further standardize member names, which is especially important when mixing profiles authored by different parties, the following rules are also recommended:

Member names SHOULD be camel-cased (i.e., wordWordWord)
Member names SHOULD start and end with a character “a-z” (U+0061 to U+007A)
Member names SHOULD contain only ASCII alphanumeric characters (i.e., “a-z”, “A-Z”, and “0-9”)

so above example should be:

{
    "firstName": "Jason",
    "lastName": "Tough"
}