OATS

Output Agnostic Tagging System aka. OATS implemented in Lua.

Format

Overview

• Tree structure like XML
• No attributes, only children
• No namespaces
• Nesting by Indentation

Nodes are enclosed with square brackets

[document]

Nested elements are indented

[document]
    [nested-tag]
    nested text

Tags with only one text node can be shortened to one-line tags:

[tag-name] single text node

evaluates to the same as

[tag-name]
    single text node

Text nodes mixed with one-line tags can further be shortened with inline tags:

Plain text with some
[bold] tagged
text
[emphasis] in between

evaluates to the same as

Plain text with some [bold tagged] text [emphasis in between]

Note: Consumers may have a better understanding of whether and how to join text elements together, while the interpreter would have to decide on a joining strategy (most likely concatenation with a space character in between).

Data Type

OATS makes no attempts to interpret text. Everything is considered a string and it is left up to the consuming application to decide how to interpret the textual representation.

Conventions

OATS is a very simple format without many restrictions. Nevertheless, the following suggestions are provided to ensure some reasonable degree of uniformity between applications:

OATS tag names preserve case, but applications consuming OATS structures should generally ignore case.

Tag names should use lowercase kebab-case.

Applications that interpret parts of a tag name as a namespace should use a single colon : as the namespace separator, with namespaces preceding the tag name.

Interface