1.7 KiB
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.