standardformat

Standardformat is a fictional, open data serialization standard intended to provide a single, language-agnostic way to encode structured information for transmission and storage. Designed to be both human-readable and machine-parsable, it aims to facilitate interoperability across programming languages, platforms, and data stores while supporting forward and backward compatibility.

The design emphasizes deterministic serialization and a clear schema model. It defines primitive types such as string, number, boolean, and null, together with composite types like arrays and maps. A separate schema language allows producers to declare required fields, default values, and validation rules, while optional metadata supports provenance and licensing.

Syntax is intentionally simple and readable. A representative snippet in standardformat might look like: name: "Example Document", version: 1, contributors: ["Alice", "Bob"], metadata: { created: 2020-01-01, license: "MIT" }. The format supports comments with a leading hash, and objects may be nested to express complex data structures.

Adoption and ecosystem: As a hypothetical standard, standardformat has limited real-world deployment. It is used mainly in academic projects, prototype services, and internal tooling where deterministic serialization and schema validation are valued. Several reference implementations exist in common programming languages to illustrate parsing and emitting data in the standardformat grammar.

Relationship to other formats: Standardformat competes with JSON, YAML, TOML, and XML. It seeks to combine JSON-like simplicity with stronger schema integration and explicit typing, while striving for stable, deterministic encodings across versions. Critics point to potential verbosity and the risk of fragmentation in ecosystems that favor existing formats.

See also: data serialization, schema languages, JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, interoperability standards.