What are good alternative data formats to XML? [closed]

Answer 1

Jeff's article on The Angle Bracket Tax summarizes a number of alternatives (well, mainly YAML), and led me to the wiki article on lightweight markup languages.

Update: Although YAML is a possible "alternative to XML" for some applications, the two are not, as I first thought, isomorphic.

Indeed, it "ain't markup language."

Furthermore, YAML ain't as "lightweight" as it appears. For documents that can be represented in plain XML (such as Jeff's example), YAML is clearly less verbose. But YAML offers many other specialized structures, enlisting many more characters and sequences than are reserved by XML.

Bottom line, if you're looking for XML-without-angle-brackets, YAML ain't it.

Answer 2

You could try google's protobufs. It's much faster than XML. There are libraries for it in C, C++, C#, Java and Python (there are alpha versons for ruby and perl). But it is binary.

Answer 3

I wouldn't dismiss plain text, like CSV or tab-delimited.

I'm really looking for alternatives that have a defined structure and (cross platform, multi language) library support. I'm interested in looking at different designs and their pros and cons. I like the idea of formats that can have a text and "binary" (compact, "compiled", fast I/O, smaller footprint) format. The advantage of having libraries is that they perform the parsing and perhaps extra data manipulation/validation for you.

Although having said that, there is definitely a use for simple formats like .ini, .plist and CSV etc. You shouldn't always have to use a hammer to crack a nut.

Answer 4

Anything you like, as long as it's not ASN.1

Answer 5

TOML is the new big thing. It has the niceness of YAML without the big spec. It extends a common and familiar configuration file format. It is directly analogous to (and translatable to) JSON. Has support in all the big languages. Created by Github co-founder/president Tom and narcissistically named. Its awesome. Give it a shot!

Sample TOML:

# This is a TOML document. Boom.

title = "TOML Example"

[owner]
name = "Tom Preston-Werner"
organization = "GitHub"
bio = "GitHub Cofounder & CEO\nLikes tater tots and beer."
dob = 1979-05-27T07:32:00Z # First class dates? Why not?

[database]
server = "192.168.1.1"
ports = [ 8001, 8001, 8002 ]
connection_max = 5000
enabled = true

[servers]

  # You can indent as you please. Tabs or spaces. TOML don't care.
  [servers.alpha]
  ip = "10.0.0.1"
  dc = "eqdc10"

  [servers.beta]
  ip = "10.0.0.2"
  dc = "eqdc10"

[clients]
data = [ ["gamma", "delta"], [1, 2] ]

# Line breaks are OK when inside arrays
hosts = [
  "alpha",
  "omega"
]

Answer 6

S-Expressions work great if you don't need to apply attributes to elements. Another alternative is YAML.