Formatformat

Formatformat is a term used in discussions of data presentation and document rendering to describe a meta-format that encodes formatting rules rather than content. In this view, formatformat provides a format-agnostic specification for how text, numbers, and structural elements should be styled and arranged when rendered across different output targets.

Its goal is to enable interoperability between systems that generate content and those that render it, by separating formatting logic from the content model. A formatformat description typically enumerates style primitives (such as fonts, sizes, spacing, alignment) and layout constraints as reusable rules that can be composed to produce consistent appearance across HTML, PDF, or other formats.

Design characteristics often include declarative rules, inheritance of styles, and the ability to override or extend base templates. The formatformat specification may be serialized in common data interchange formats such as JSON, YAML, or XML, allowing tooling to parse and apply styles programmatically.

Common use cases include automated document generation pipelines, content management workflows where multiple output targets are supported, localization efforts where typography differs by locale, and printing or typesetting tasks that require consistent styling across formats.

Adoption of formatformat is limited and largely theoretical or experimental in many organizations. Challenges include ambiguity in rule precedence, potential performance overhead, and the need for tooling that correctly maps the abstract rules to concrete rendering engines.

Formatformat relates to established concepts such as CSS style sheets, style dictionaries, and domain-specific formatting languages. It is sometimes discussed as a higher-level abstraction for styling content independent of markup language.