Data resources

Human-oriented Markup Language

HUML is a simple, strict, serialization language for documents, datasets, and configuration. It prioritizes strict form for human-readability. It looks like YAML, but tries to avoid its complexity, ambiguity, and pitfalls.

01 Sep 2025Invisible XML

Invisible XML (ixml) is a method for treating non-XML documents as if they were XML, enabling authors to write documents and data in a format they prefer while providing XML for processes that are more effective with XML content.

(This is the community group’s current working draft.)

Supersedes: Invisible XML 1.0

20 Jun 2022Invisible XML 1.0

Invisible XML (ixml) is a method for treating non-XML documents as if they were XML, enabling authors to write documents and data in a format they prefer while providing XML for processes that are more effective with XML content.

JavaScript Object Notation

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

JSON for Linking Data

JSON-LD is a lightweight Linked Data format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is based on the already successful JSON format and provides a way to help JSON data interoperate at Web-scale. JSON-LD is an ideal data format for programming environments, REST Web services, and unstructured databases such as Apache CouchDB and MongoDB.

16 Jul 2020JSON-LD 1.1

JSON is a useful data serialization and messaging format. This specification defines JSON-LD 1.1, a JSON-based format to serialize Linked Data. The syntax is designed to easily integrate into deployed systems that already use JSON, and provides a smooth upgrade path from JSON to JSON-LD. It is primarily intended to be a way to use Linked Data in Web-based programming environments, to build interoperable Web services, and to store Linked Data in JSON-based storage engines.

16 Jul 2020JSON-LD 1.1 Framing

JSON-LD Framing allows developers to query by example and force a specific tree layout to a JSON-LD document.

This specification describes a superset of the features defined in JSON-LD Framing 1.0 [JSON-LD10-FRAMING] and, except where noted, the algorithms described in this specification are fully compatible with documents created using the previous community standard.

16 Jul 2020JSON-LD 1.1 Processing Algorithms and API

This specification defines a set of algorithms for programmatic transformations of JSON-LD documents. Restructuring data according to the defined transformations often dramatically simplifies its usage. Furthermore, this document proposes an Application Programming Interface (API) for developers implementing the specified algorithms.

MAML: Minimal. Human-readable. Machine-parsable.

JSON is the most popular data-interchange format. But it isn't a very good configuration language.

MAML keeps JSON’s simplicity and adds only the needed bits for a good configuration language:

  1. Comments
  2. Multiline strings
  3. Optional commas
  4. Optional key quotes

MAML is human-readable and easy to parse.

microformats

microformats are HTML for marking up people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumes, recipes etc. Sites use microformats to publish a standard API that is consumed and used by search engines, browsers, and other web sites. See what-are-microformats for more.

TOML [Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language]

Tom's Obvious Minimal Language (TOML) aims to be a minimal configuration file format that's easy to read due to obvious semantics. TOML is designed to map unambiguously to a hash table. TOML should be easy to parse into data structures in a wide variety of languages.

YAML Ain’t Markup Language

YAML is a human-friendly data serialization language for all programming languages.