According to Crockford's json.org, a JSON object is made up of members, which is made up of pairs.
Every pair is made of a string and a value, with a string being defined as:
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.
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.
Does it make any sense to bother surrounding your JSON in double quotes?
Valid Example:
{
keyName : 34
}
As opposed to the invalid:
{
keyName : 34
}