TSML(5)                   FreeBSD File Formats Manual                  TSML(5)

NAME
     Tree-Structure Markup Language – alternative to XML and SML.

DESCRIPTION
     TSML describes the structure of UTF-8 documents.  No means is provided to
     describe which trees are valid expressions for any particular application
     of the language.  There is no versioning of TSML.  This document
     describes the one-and-only version of TSML.  If you create a format
     derived from TSML please call it something else.  TSML is hereby licensed
     gratis to everyone forever for any purpose.

   ELEMENTS AND TAGS
     TSML documents consist of two types of lexical components:  tags and
     data.  Tags are either open or close tags.  Data is everything not a tag.
     The structural components of TSML documents are called elements.  Each
     element is described by one open tag and one identically-named or
     anonymous close tag that occurs in the document subsequent to the open
     tag.  Elements may contain a mixture of data and other elements to form
     tree-structure.  Nested elements must exist completely inside one direct
     parent element.

     Open tags have the form:

     [<name>[

     Open tags begin and end with a single byte of value 91 that represents
     the open square bracket in UTF-8.  The sequence of bytes between the
     brackets is the name of the element.  Names are case-sensitive.  The name
     may be any sequence of byte values in which 0, 91, 92, and 93 do not
     appear that is less than 256 bytes in length.  91, 92, and 93, are the
     UTF-8 encodings for the characters [, \, and ].  Note that whitespace is
     permissable in element names.

     Close tags have the form:

     ]<name>]

     Close tags begin and end with a single byte of value 93 that represents
     the close square bracket in UTF-8.  The name component of close tags is
     optional and if present, must be the exact same sequence of byte values
     as the name of the corresponding open tag.

     A TSML document must have a single top-level element that contains all
     other document content.  The names of all elements are application
     specific.  None is specified by this document.  Elements may be empty.
     The following is an example of an empty document:

     [TSML[]]

   DATA
     Data are any sequence of byte values excluding 0 in which any occurrence
     of the values 91, 92, and 93 are preceded by a byte of value 92.  In
     other words, to insert [, \, or ] into data, escape these characters with
     a backslash.  Although it is not necessary, other characters may be
     escaped by preceding them with a backslash.  A TSML parser must remove
     the escaping backslash from all such character sequences before returning
     data to an application.

     Beyond escape-processing, a TSML parser must not modify TSML element data
     before returning it to an application.

     There is no mechanism to embed comments into TSML documents.  Users
     define their own application specific schema and can define their own
     comment elements:

     [comment[This is a comment.]]

   EXAMPLE
     An example TSML document follows.

     [News Feed[

        [Source[
           [Title[Source Title]]
           [Link[Source Link]]
           [Description[Source Description]]
        ]]

        [Item[
           [Title[Item 1]]
           [Link[Link 1]]
           [Description[Description 1]]
        ]]

        [Item[
           [Title[Item 2]]
           [Link[Link 2]]
           [Description[Description 2]]
        ]]

     ]News Feed]

AUTHORS
     James Bailie ⟨jimmy@mammothcheese.ca⟩
     http://www.mammothcheese.ca

                                Fri Dec 1, 2017