The thing is - it's not only about whitespace, otherwise I would probably not bother with the generic interface. For my original problem, there is simply no way to do this correctly in an extension w/o copying over all of the logic from json.c, which I have to do right now, would rather not.
I am sorry - we are talking about JSON, not about any styled document. I disagree, so it has not be implemented as extension - the backport of JSON support is a extension.
Hm... I'm having a hard time making sense of that statement, sorry.
To reiterate: for my problem, that is escaping numerics that can potentially overflow[1] under ECMAScript standard, I want to be able to override the code that outputs the numeric converted to string. There is no way in current implementation to do that *at all*, short of copying all the code involved in producing JSON output and changing it at certain points. One could try re-parsing JSON instead, but that doesn't actually solve the issue, because type information is lost forever at that point.
The whitespace unification was a mere side-effect of the original effort on this patch.