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

Multi-line text nodes are yet to be decided. As of now, the options are:

1. Consecutive non-empty lines of text are merged with a space
2. Any non-empty text line is always a single text element

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).

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.

Interface