Notes document is primitive compared to CouchDB JSON document

A Notes document is limited to name/value pairs of primitives (number,string,date) and lists thereof.

Notes applications often required more complex structures that could be represented by these limited types. Those structures were encoded into strings (and strings thereof), traditionally using the | as the separator. Much of the application code then consisted of logic to pack and unpack these representations.

JSON allows the CouchDB document to contain an arbitrary object tree. A wide variety of tools are available for parsing and data binding, further reducing the development effort.